The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole. So why are these works now hanging in the Wallace Collection? What are they doing in the home of such masters as Rembrandt or Poussin, Titian or Fragonard?

The answer is simple: they are by Damien Hirst. And his is a name that curators must welcome. The artist who can transform a pickled bovine into a cash cow has the commercial touch that any cash-strapped museum needs, not least the somewhat sedate Wallace Collection. Plus, the Hirst show comes complete with a fully paid-for gallery refurbishment (the artist covered the entire cost of the £250,000 exhibition) including a silk wall fabric commissioned from Marie Antoinette’s preferred manufacturers at a cost that would leave most of us dreaming of off-cuts.

Hirst undoubtedly has an entrepreneurial talent. Ever since he launched his landmark 1988 Freeze show he has been upping the ante, testing the parameters of expectation and taste.

Now he makes his latest departure. In the conceptual milieu which he has done so much to make fashionable, what now counts as radical is a return to tradition.

Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a distance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented in traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?

No Love Lost: Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst is at The Wallace Collection (020-7563 9500 www.wallacecollection.org) from October 14 to January 24

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