Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford is an art critic and art historian. He studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. Over three decades, he has written prolifically about art and music in a series of major biographies, as well as contributing regularly to newspapers, magazines and exhibition catalogues. In parallel with his career as an art historian, he was art critic of The Spectator magazine and The Sunday Telegraph newspaper before becoming Chief Art Critic for the international television network, Bloomberg News. He has been a regular contributor to the British journal of art criticism, Modern Painters.

His books include a study of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles (Little Brown, 2006), which was published in Britain and the USA to critical acclaim, and has been translated, to date, into five languages; Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter (Penguin, 2009), a study of John Constable’s romance with Maria Bicknell and their lives between 1809 and 1816; and A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Thames and Hudson, 2011).