Brian Sewell

Died: September 19 2015

Brian Sewell, who has died aged 84, was Britain's best-known art critic, despite the fact that he worked for the London Evening Standard and his reviews were seldom seen outwith the capital. It hardly mattered; Sewell's distinctive personality and yet more singular voice, and his uncompromising judgments on modern art, made him famous enough to be sent up by impressionists, and picked up by television panel shows.

His voice was a thing of wonder. It was variously described as "Lady Bracknell on acid" and "no more than a series of elongated upper-crust vowel sounds"; he himself conceded it was that of "an Edwardian lesbian" and owed something to Vita Sackville-West. Though often described as RP, it bore little resemblance to sounds that had ever been received in polite company. Like Sewell's opinions and personality, it was mainly sui generis.

He first sprang to public notice in connection with his close friend and teacher at the Courtauld Institute, Sir Anthony Blunt. Blunt, who had been Surveyor of the King's Pictures and director of the Courtauld, had been unmasked as a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring in the early 1960s, though the information had not been made public.

But in November 1979, Blunt's involvement as a Soviet agent was made public by Margaret Thatcher, and he was stripped of his knighthood. Before the news broke, friends spirited Blunt away to avoid the press, and Sewell emerged as his defender in the media scrum. The public response to his loyalty, appearance and manner, footage of him walking his dogs and, above all, his diction and vocabulary was a mixture of fascination and frank incredulity.

Recognising a good thing when she saw it, Tina Brown, then editor of Tatler, signed Sewell up as the magazine's art critic. Though he described the move as "a sad end to a once-promising career", it was undoubtedly his metier. He moved to the Standard in 1984, for which he wrote until his death.

His success was routinely attributed to the fact that his views on contemporary art chimed with those of the general public, and that he was fearless, outspoken and hilariously rude about what he saw as "rubbish" - Tracy Emin was "worthless", Banksy "should have been put down at birth", Gilbert and George were "Tweedledum and Tweedledee", and Damien Hirst was "f***ing dreadful".

Accepted "great" artists were as likely to incur his scorn, and readers seemed to happy to agree with his verdicts, delivered de haut en bas. He was ready to attack those working in traditional forms – David Hockney was a "vulgar prankster" and Lucian Freud "a lousy draughtsman" – and to praise contemporary, even conceptual work he found interesting, notably that of the Chapman Brothers.

Sewell's background and upbringing were at the root of these idiosyncratic judgements. He was born in Leicestershire on June 15 1931. His mother Jessica was an unsuccessful painter and, he later surmised, "something of a prostitute", who inhabited the raffish demi-monde of inter-war bohemia. Sewell's father was the sexually complicated composer Peter Warlock (the pseudonym of Peter Heseltine), who urged Brian's mother to have an abortion. He gassed himself, having put the cat out, seven months before his son was born, and Sewell learned his father's identity only towards the end of his mother's life.

He was brought up in shabby gentility in Kensington, west London, and at Whitstable in Kent. Until 11, he was educated by friends of his mother and by visits to the National Gallery and the capital's other cultural centres. He also had a strong attachment to Catholicism, being brought up amidst Carmelites. Young Brian had a precocious knowledge of art, classics and music by the time his mother married Robert Sewell, and he was sent to Haberdashers' Aske's school in Hampstead. He was turned into an Anglican, but his homosexuality, which he had identified in himself at an early age, was unaffected.

He disliked his time at school, but managed, despite "furious opposition from my school, which did not teach it" to take a leaving certificate in art history, in which he gained a distinction. He also claimed that he had managed to have sexual relations with every member of the football team.

Sewell was offered a place at Oxford, but then discovered the existence of the Courtauld. He briefly attended after school, but at the time was torn between becoming a painter (he later concluded that he "had some talent, but nothing to say") and a violinist, and eventually threw it up to do his National Service.

Rather surprisingly, he enjoyed his time in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he turned out to be a good marksman and embarked on a lifelong passion for motor vehicles; he also enjoyed the "non-sexual camaraderie" of other men. At this point, the 20-year-old Sewell had decided to embrace chastity, after a heterosexual encounter with a woman of 60, and a vague notion that he might seek Holy Orders, with a view to becoming "a bishop, at the very least".

Back at the Courtauld, under the tutelage of Blunt, Michael Kitson and Johannes Wilde, he realised his true vocation, and ditched the church for art. Having asked for, but failed to receive, a sign from God, he also re-embraced men, literally, and with a vengeance. In his memoirs he estimated that he had slept with 1,000 as a young man. He claimed that he and Blunt had never been lovers, but that Blunt's fellow spy, Guy Burgess, had made a pass at him shortly before he defected to the Soviet Union.

Sewell's view was that the greatest strength of his education at the Courtauld was the ability to look properly, and to see something new, in paintings. In truth, it was his greatest gift and strength as an art historian and critic. Rather than drawing on received wisdom or consensus, he approached every exhibition as if seeing it with new eyes, and conveyed it effectively to the reader. He was as likely to judge Leonardo "tedious" as he was to find something to admire in Dadaism – while deprecating its influence on later conceptual work.

Women, however, remained beyond the pale. After he declared, in 1994, that there had never been any female artists of the first rank, he was roundly criticised by the great and the good in the art world.

After abandoning a doctorate (on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, then spectacularly unfashionable) he joined Christie's, where he specialised in prints and drawings and tried, unsuccessfully, to interest the house in the work of John Minton. Sewell shared with him a familiarity with Soho during the famously louche 1950s, later confessing that drink, LSD and rough trade occupied much of his time. But only the last affected his high standing at Christie's, from which he resigned when it became clear a homosexual would not be appointed to the board.

He then had a period as an art dealer, with mixed fortunes, before embarking on his career as a critic. Sewell was, in person, a very kind, generous and entirely unaffected colleague, whose reaction to any news (he was an inveterate gossip) was usually a mixture of irritated contempt and barely suppressed laughter – it was not always easy to tell the difference. He dressed casually, and was devoted to the collection of dogs who shared his house, first in Kensington and then, after a heart operation, at a bungalow in Wimbledon.

He wrote not only on art but, as his celebrity increased, as a reviewer of motor cars and then as a general and political columnist, winning the Orwell prize in 2003. He produced two volumes of memoirs, full of gossip. But he remained passionate above all in defending the great cultural inheritance of Western art – "the key that opens the doors to all other disciplines". When asked where he would make room for it in the curriculum, he replied "get rid of mathematics".

He died on Saturday, having been diagnosed with cancer some months earlier.

ANDREW MCKIE