Peter Howson

Art Brokerage: Peter Howson Scottish Artist: b. 1958. Peter Howson OBE (born London, England, 27 March 1958) is a Scottish painter. He was the British official war artist in the 1993 Bosnian Civil War. Peter Howson was born in London of Scottish parents and moved with his family to Prestwick, Ayrshire, when was aged four. He was raised in a religious family and the first ever painting he did was a Crucifixion, when he was 6 years old. He spent a short time as an infantry soldier in the Royal Highland Fusiliers but left to study at the Glasgow School of Art, from 1975 to 1977, and from 1979 to 1981. Here he worked alongside contemporaries such as Adrian Wiszniewski, Steven Campbell and Ken Currie, who also worked in figurative art. His work has encompassed a number of themes. His early works are typified by very masculine working class men, most famously in The Heroic Dosser (1987). Later he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum of London, to be the official war artist for the Bosnian/Hercegovina under Serbian and Croatian aggression in 1993. Here he produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time, like Plum Grove (1994). One painting in particular Croatian and Muslim, detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the accounts of its victims. He was also the official war painter at the Kosovo War for the London Times.