Sir John Patrick Richardson, KBE is a British art historian and Picasso biographer. Richardson was the elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., Quarter-Master General in the Boer War, and founder of London and the British Empire's Army & Navy Stores. Initially, he wanted to become an artist; he met and made friends with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom portrayed him later. A month short of seventeen, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, was called up, but soon fell ill and spent the rest of the war with his mother and siblings in London. During daytime,... he worked as an industrial designer before becoming a reviewer for The New Observer. In 1950, he became acquainted with art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, sharing his life for the next 10 years. He moved to southern France in 1952, as Douglas Cooper acquired Château de Castille in the vicinity of Avignon and transformed the run-down castle into a private museum of early Cubism.
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