It seems to me that the auction houses are equally culpable. They are training their sights on financially pressed colleges and museums as part of their business development strategies. This is art-world ambulance chasing.

In May 2016, Barbara Jatta was summoned to the Roman home of her boss, Archbishop Jean-Louis Bruguès, the librarian and archivist of the Catholic church. He told her he had received a letter from the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, its central bureaucracy, informing him that Jatta had been chosen to lead the Vatican Museums. This extraordinary assemblage of collections and buildings, created by successive popes, encompasses antiquities, Etruscan objects, a paintings gallery, papal apartments, rooms decorated by Raphael and, of course, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Jatta was asked immediately to leave the Vatican Library, where she had worked for around 20 years and led the prints department from 2010. She would serve for six months as the deputy to the museums’ then director, Antonio Paolucci, before succeeding him. And that was that. “I went white; I was shocked. It was a radical change for me,” she remembers.

Prior to the introduction of the paddle system, buyers were allowed to choose their own bidding signals. The American industrialist and collector Norton Simon sent a letter to Christie’s before the sale of the Rembrandt, explaining, ‘If he is sitting he is bidding; if he stands he has stopped bidding. If he sits down again he is not bidding until he raises his finger. Having raised his finger he is bidding again until he stands up again.’ Unfortunately, Chance misinterpreted Simon’s sitting and finger-raising, and sold the work to Marlborough Fine Art in London for 700,000 guineas. 

When the hammer came down, the enraged collector approached Chance’s rostrum and demanded that bidding be reopened. Simon went on to win the auction, spending an additional 60,000 guineas to secure the work. But if the industrialist’s obscure bidding tactics were intended to help him hide from press attention, he now became the focus of the sale. When the painting made the front cover of Time  magazine that year, Simon became an unlikely star. Today the portrait hangs in Simon’s museum in Pasadena, California.

In another twist of fate, Thomas Woods, the son of Stowe’s gamekeeper, was so inspired by the sale that he decided to become an auctioneer. In 1859 Woods joined George Christie and William Manson as a partner in their firm, creating Christie, Manson & Woods — still the official name for Christie’s.

My Manchester-based brother mentioned that something had happened but I hadn’t realised it was THAT painting. It is a sad day when the greatest masterpiece by one of Britain’s greatest painters (and he really was the best pure painter active in the UK after Turner) can no longer be seen by the British public. We’ve become used to arts education and funding being under threat from people like Michael Gove, who have the excuse of not ‘belonging’ to the arts; but for the threat to accessibility to come from WITHIN one of the UK’s major art institutions beggars belief. We could forgive the curators if it were purely a clever ruse to promote the still under-publicised genius of Waterhouse, but Clare Gannaway’s commentary suggests that the decision really was motivated by a moral objection to the supposed content of the work — as though taking the picture off view would somehow punish the artist for his non-adherence to the moral standards of a later century, or protect contemporary viewers from the insidious effects of his perceived mysogeny.

The great irony, of course, which nobody seems to have mentioned, is that the subject of the painting is the sexual objectification of a MALE body, NOT a female body; in the ancient myth, the nymphs are the predatory aggressors; Hylas is the helpless, lusted-after victim. They are immortal; HE is underage. There is nothing to suggest that Waterhouse intended the nymphs to look like children, and until I read this article that thought would never have entered my mind. Viewers of his time would have recognised the subject and all of its relatively innocent connotations instantly, as an episode in one of the most famous mythological stories (Jason’s Argonauts and the Golden Fleece). Gannaway’s statements reveal her to be uninformed about the very painting she takes the authority to discuss (it isn’t clear why a contemporary art curator is involved — do her views outweigh those of her colleagues responsible for the Victorian pictures?), lacking the basic education that should be indispensable for any humanist professional, and ultimately confused about the very real social problems that she claims to be helping address.

William Turner, who is descended from the artist’s grandparents, said: “It’s just not on. It does cheapen his works.” Jean Steward, another descendant, said she believed Turner would be shocked.

Ray Turner, also a family member, said: “You’ve got two of Turner’s masterpieces on some bovver boots, so they’re a bit of a contradiction.”

Julian Spalding, former director of museums and galleries in Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, said: “The Tate should have nothing to do with this. It’s nothing to do with increasing people’s understanding and enjoyment of Turner, which is the Tate’s mission and why the Tate is supported by public money.”

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.”

The owners, whose forbears made the Grand Tour of Italy in 1850, were completely unaware who the painting was by until a routine valuation visit by Cheffins auctioneers from Cambridge started an investigative ball rolling.

Cheffins called in their Old Master paintings consultant, John Somerville, a former specialist at Sotheby’s, who recognised the painting as ‘Bolognese School’ Baroque, but needed corroboration for an attribution to Guercino as only one dog portrait by the artist is known.

That painting, a brindle mastiff with the Aldrovandi family coat of arms on its collar, was sold in 1972 for the then princely sum of £110,000  to the Norton Simon Museum in America where it hangs today. The Cheffins painting is of a bull mastiff, or, more correctly in Italian, a Cane Corso.

Throughout the month of February, visitors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), are able to witness firsthand the restoration of two portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn in the “Conservation in Action” gallery. The treatment of Portrait of a Woman with a Gold Chain (1634) is supported by a grant from The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), and the MFA has also committed to restoring its companion piece, Portrait of a Man Wearing a Black Hat (1634). The works were the first paintings by the Dutch Golden Age master to enter a Boston museum’s collection when they were donated to the MFA in 1893.

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to conserve these seminal paintings by Rembrandt, which normally have an important presence in our galleries,” said Ronni Baer, William and Ann Elfers Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe. “Our hope is to gain a deeper understanding of these works, which were painted during an interesting, transitional and intense time in the artist’s career.”

Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the aim of the removal was to provoke debate, not to censor. “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.”

The work usually hangs in a room titled In Pursuit of Beauty, which contains late 19th century paintings showing lots of female flesh.

Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.

“For me personally, there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner. Our attention has been elsewhere ... we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”

Creativity has never been morally pure. Not so long ago, in the 90s, art was deliberately shocking and some were duly shocked to visit galleries and be shown Myra Hindley, unmade beds and toy Nazis. Now the tables have turned, and it’s cool to be appalled by – in this case – art made over a century ago. I can’t pretend to respect such authoritarianism. It is the just the spectre of an oppressive past wearing new clothes – and if we fall for the disguise we sign away every liberal value.