The new works, entitled 'No Love Lost', are made from oil paint on canvas. Pure and simple, just like the Old Masters used to make them. You know, guys like Vermeer or Rubens. No, not Rubens, he's a bad example because he also used scores of humble assistants to help him make his paintings, while Damien did these ones himself, all on his own. Like Van Gogh.

Hirst is calling his new paintings The Blue Paintings. This is not because he was sad when he was making them, although he may have felt a bit lonely suddenly finding himself in a big studio with all his assistants gone off somewhere else (no doubt scratching their heads and wondering what's got into the maestro).

No, these are called The Blue Paintings because they are blue, although it may also be because Picasso had a blue period and Hirst likes to be associated with the great masters of painting. That may also explain why the new works look a bit like Francis Bacon's pictures, for Bacon was another master whom Hirst admires. And the admiration was mutual. Bacon was said to have stood for a long time in front of Hirst's dead horse's head piece, luxuriating in its dark existentialist aura.

There's lots of wiry Baconesque grids hovering in Hirst's new paintings, open space-frames in which skulls, shark's jaws and other ghostly motifs are suspended, rather like the floating livestock in the trademark vitrine pieces for which he is so famous.

In another deliberate break with the expected order of things, Hirst has has chosen to exhibit these new paintings not in a conventional 'white cube' gallery space, or even in the White Cube gallery run by his erstwhile dealer Jay Jopling, who helped launch Hirst's career following their fortuitous first meeting in a London pub in 1991.

No, instead the Blue Paintings will be hung in the elaborate surroundings of London's Wallace Collection, a grand Belle Époque mansion museum in Manchester Square just north of Oxford Street. So you'll be able to wander around admiring the masterpieces by Fragonard, Boucher, Frans Hals, Rubens, Titian and the rest, pausing occasionally to stroke an ormolu-mounted commode by Riesener or Linke, before turning a corner to be confronted by Damien Hirst's paintings that he did all by himself with nobody helping him or holding his pallette, the imposing canvases being, we are told, the result of the artist's "return to the solitary practice of painting."

That phrase reminded me of the title of a fine book about the German painter Gerhard Richter - The Daily Practice of Painting - which sought to communicate the dedication and commitment that Richter has always invested in his work. One doesn't want to be too uncharitable to Hirst (having cleared a cool £100 million at Sotheby's exactly a year ago, charity is the last thing he needs), but it's hard to imagine Hirst engaging with the difficult, often thankless processes that the really great painters are prepared go through and which is ultimately what separates them from the vast armies of mediocre ones who don't.

I recall reading a quote by Hirst in which he described his desperation as a young art student when confronted by the empty canvas. He just didn't have it in him to conquer that tabula rasa. Instead, like so many millions of other art students since Duchamp opened the gate, he turned to 'sculpture'. Fortunately for Hirst, by the time he began pickling his sharks and gluing his butterflies, sculpture had already been redefined by critic Rosalind Krauss as an "expanded field". One reading of that was that the only rule was that there were no rules.

But arguably that represents a far harder set of parameters in which to make an impact than one in which the boundaries are all clearly defined. Of course, there was a time when artists who set out to "make an impact" rather than to make art, would have been doomed to failure. But not any more. Hirst embarked on the road less travelled and in no time, with the help of an Aussie shark-hunter, a few gallons of  formaldehyde and one or two handy engineers, he was sprinting to stardom.

And now he has returned to confront his demon, or more specifically the demon of easel painting. And that is perhaps why these paintings are better off seen in the Wallace than in a white cube like White Cube. They are not about painting. They don't need to be seen in a placeless white cube place devoid of context and external distractions. But to what extent they will survive being juxtaposed with Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Boucher and Greuze remains to be seen.

At least he painted them himself.

Damien Hirst: ;No Love Lost: The Blue Paintings' at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London, from 14th October to 24th January 2010.

Tom Flynn