Collector, art patronage scholar, director of the Burlington Magazine, 1952-1986. Ford was the son of Captain Richard Ford (1860-1940), a British army officer, and Rosamund Isabel Ramsden (1872-1911). He was descendant of the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). His great-grandfather, Richard Ford (1796-1856), was a connoisseur and author of the important travel book on Spain, Handbook For Spain,1845. Born to wealth, Ford attended Eton and then Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1930 in modern history.