Richard Dorment was born in the US and studied at Princeton and Columbia before joining the staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1986 he became the chief art critic of The Daily Telegraph in London, and in 1992 he won the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism. In 2000 he was named ‘Critic of the Year’ in the British Press awards, and in 2014 he won the Holland Prize for his review of the re-opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He was awarded the CBE in 2014 for his services to the arts. He retired in 2015.
He has written several exhibition and museum collection catalogs, and academic books, but this is the first collection of his reviews to be published.