Hockney, who at 74 is creating enormous landscape paintings based on the fields and woods of his native Yorkshire, agreed that he had Hirst in his sights, adding a criticism of art schools.

“It’s a little insulting to craftsmen,” he said. “I used to point out, at art school you can teach the craft; it’s the poetry you can’t teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft.” He quoted a Chinese proverb that to be a painter “you need the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won’t do.”