Peter Howson valuation
New Glasgow Boy who went to Bosnia as a war artist and painted what it did to him.
Peter Howson was born in London in 1958 and raised in Ayrshire, served briefly in the army, and emerged from Glasgow School of Art with Ken Currie, Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski as one of the New Glasgow Boys.
What a work by Peter Howson is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Peter Howson was born in London in 1958 and raised in Ayrshire, served briefly in the army, and emerged from Glasgow School of Art with Ken Currie, Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski as one of the New Glasgow Boys. The paintings are heavily muscled, heavily worked figure compositions of soldiers, boxers, drinkers and crowds. He was appointed official British war artist in Bosnia in 1993, and the work he brought back — including the disputed Croatian and Muslim, which the Imperial War Museum declined — marked a turning point in his life and in his subject matter. He has been open about addiction, breakdown, faith and a late Asperger's diagnosis.
The market is principally British and is led by the large 1980s and 1990s figure paintings and the Bosnia work. Drawings in charcoal and conte are numerous, frequently very strong, and are the most accessible part of the output; Howson draws constantly and the supply is substantial. There is a print output in lithograph and etching. Some paintings from the 1990s are on unprimed or lightly primed board and have surface and support issues that are worth checking. Signature is usually on the reverse.
At a glance
- Born
- 1958, London
- Movement
- Contemporary art
Bosnia, the Edinburgh retrospective and the collections
Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum as official war artist for the Bosnian war in 1993, Howson produced some of the hardest work of his career, including Plum Grove of 1994. The City Art Centre in Edinburgh gave him a retrospective of more than a hundred paintings in May 2023.
His work is in many British public collections, among them the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Ben Uri, and he has shown with Flowers in London. Gallery catalogues and invoices are the usual documentation for a painting or drawing.
Glencorse, The Heroic Dosser and St Andrew's Cathedral
Howson grew up in Prestwick, repeated his first year at Glasgow School of Art after failing it, and in 1977 left to join the army, training at Glencorse Barracks near Edinburgh. He went back to the school on a Hospitalfield scholarship in 1979 and left again in 1981 without graduating. The Heroic Dosser of 1987 is the best known of his early pictures of tough working men. After Bosnia he painted the Kosovo war for The Times, and he went back to Bosnia in 1999.
His work reached a wide public on a Royal Mail stamp in 1999 marking engineering achievements for the millennium, and on the covers of Live's Throwing Copper and the Beautiful South's Quench. The religious paintings that followed his treatment at Castle Craig in 2000 include Judas of 2002 and a large commission for St Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow, completed in 2010, and Flowers East showed series such as The Stations of the Cross in 2003 and Harrowing of Hell in 2008. He was appointed OBE in 2009.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
