Mr Uglow warned that whilst art history in universities is an academic pursuit, making it inevitable that students will spend much of their time reading scholarly material, it was vital that students spend time “just looking, and to take pleasure in looking.”

Mr Uglow said the course at Manchester is dedicated to connoisseurship, something he says  as become largely extinct in university departments since the 1980s.

“For me, connoisseurship is the detailed analysis of style and technique with the aim of identifying authorship,” said Mr Uglow.

“For many other art historians, it’s about exercising taste and elitist snobbery, it’s corrupted by market forces and has a distasteful focus on monetary value, it’s pedantic and snide, deeply patriarchal, and terribly old fashioned. But I would say this has more to do with connoisseurs then connoisseurship.”