Martin Gayford is the author of books on Michelangelo, Constable, Van Gogh, David Hockney, Gillian Ayres, Lucian Freud and a collaboration with Philippe de Montebello, Rendez-Vous with Art.

In 2016 he published A History of Pictures, co-written with Hockney, a sweeping survey of visual images of the world; Modernists and Mavericks, a survey of painting in London after the Second World War, followed in 2018. His most recent publication is The Pursuit of Art a collection of encounters with art and artists in distant places. Shaping the World, an exploration of sculpture from prehistory until today co-written with Antony Gormley, will be published in autumn 2020.

Martin Gayford has also curated exhibitions, including Constable Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery (2009) and the forthcoming Hockney’s Eye(s) at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Heong Gallery, Cambridge, planned for summer 2021. His portrait was painted and etched by Lucian Freud and he was one of the sitters for Hockney’s sequence of works, 82 Portraits and One Still Life, exhibited at the Royal Academy, London and elsewhere. He is art critic of the Spectator and lives in Cambridge.