"This book is a sharply etched portrait of Douglas Cooper, the colorful Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world's most important private cubist collection. It is also the story of Cooper and Richardson's association, which began in 1949 and came to fruition - and ultimately disaster - at the Chateau de Castille, the eighteenth-century colonnaded folly in Provence that they restored and filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Juan Gris. Besides these artists and the women in their lives, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Helena Rubenstein, Peggy Guggenheim, and Anthony Blunt are just some of the figures who leap off the page to appear before us in an entirely new light. A major revelation of the book is its portrait of Picasso in Private Richardson's friendship with the artist coincided with a period of dramatic change in the artist's life."--BOOK JACKET.