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 Wisniewski as one of the New Glasgow Boys.
What a work by Peter Howson is worth
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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 Wisniewski 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.
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.
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.
