The veteran art critic, broadcaster and great British eccentric Brian Sewell has died.

Sewell, who was the art critic at the London Evening Standard newspaper for more than 30 years, passed away at his London home yesterday morning, his agent confirmed.

He had been battling cancer for many years.

The 84-year-old was well known for his controversial and often vitriolic views, dismissing the Turner Prize as an “annual farce”, calling Damian Hirst "f-----g dreadful" and claiming “there has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness”.

His critics accused him of "virulent homophobia and misogyny" and being "deeply hostile to and ignorant about contemporary art".

While at art college he became friends with his tutor, art historian Anthony Blunt, the so-called "Fourth Man" in the infamous Cambridge spy ring in the late 1970s. It was Sewell who helped his mentor flee the press and, in the process, found himself in the media spotlight for the first time.

When he later became an art dealer he included a host of famous artists amongst his friends including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Salvador Dali. He also claimed to have performed a sex act for Dali while he took photographs.

He wrote his autobiography, ‘Outsider: Almost Always, Never Quite’, at the age of 80, which dealt with the first 36 years of his life and followed it with ‘Outsider II’ two years later.

In a 2012 interview with the BBC he said art was something "that brings people like me to life" and said he became an art critic "by accident".