“I have earned my living as an art critic for exactly ten years,” wrote Brian Sewell, who has died, aged 84, in 1990. “I learned at once that it was the easiest way to make enemies and lose friends. One erstwhile friend, himself a critic of long standing, who at his 50th birthday party declared, 'I thought of having principles; then I decided that I was too old for them,' did not speak to me for nine years.
"Another critic, even better known for his contributions to The Connoisseur, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, made the most damaging remarks about me on television when I dared to comment on the Salvador Dalì exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1980 (my very first attempt at criticism), unaware that I had known Dalì for some years and been his guest at Port Lligat for five consecutive summers.
"For my adverse comments on the sycophancy of Kaleidoscope, the BBC’s nightly radio programme on the arts, I have been for ever excluded from it and from all other programmes on which I might reasonably expect to air my views as much as other critics. I have been beaten about the head and shoulders with a wet umbrella (an ineffective weapon, though clammily unpleasant) by a Bond Street dealer who felt his stock and reputation impugned. I have been approached by another with the question, 'What would it take to keep you quiet over so-and-so - you’re affecting my sales?' I have been elbowed and pushed from commercial galleries, and for some weeks, when I was only the art critic of Tatler, a monthly gossip magazine of not the slightest influence, sported a black eye and a livid yellow cheek.”
Sewell ended his account of his first of more than three decades as an art critic on a modest but defiant note: “I shall soon be forgotten as a scribbler but it will not matter as long as there are others prepared to lock horns with the Establishment, to mock and make nonsense of it and all its works, to ride its blows and suffer an occasional black eye.”