Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood, the First Couple of the contemporary British art world, last night announced the end of their 11-year marriage.

He was the well-connected Old Etonian son of a Conservative MP who became the superstar dealer to Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers.

She was the daughter of a Streatham yoga teacher and an absent biker father who grew up on a commune and beat two cancers to become the the glamorous face of the Young British Artist (YBA) generation.

Together they presided over a spectacularly star-studded social scene from their grand art-stuffed house in Marylebone, hosting part of Kate Moss’s 30th birthday party celebrations and inviting Daniel Craig, Elton John, David Walliams and the Pet Shop Boys to the christening of their second child, Jessie.

The pair said that no one else was involved in the break-up. For Jopling the announcement ends a miserable week in which he has watched his most famous client, Hirst, bypass his services and pull in £111.5 million from a pioneering auction of new work at Sotheby’s.

White Cube, Jay Jopling’s commercial gallery, first opened its doors in East London in 1993 and built its reputation by giving one-person shows to YBAs such as Emin. It moved to Hoxton Square in 2000 and a second site, where Hirst showed off his £50 million diamond-encrusted skull, opened in St James’s in 2006.

Taylor-Wood was part of the generation of artists, including Hirst, who studied at Goldsmiths in the late 1980s. Her career was already up and running by the time she met and fell in love with Jopling in 1994.

She won the Most Promising Artist award at the 1997 Venice Biennale and was nominated for the Turner Prize the next year. She watched the award ceremony on television from the chemotherapy ward where she was recovering from colon cancer.

She later had a mastectomy when she had an unrelated breast cancer diagnosed.

She is best known for persuading a succession of famous men, including Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman, Benicio Del Toro, Paul Newman, David Beckham and Robert Downey Jr, to lay bare their vulnerability for her camera.

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