When the Apple Ripens: Peter Howson at 65

‘What an artist. They’ll be talking about him in a hundred years’ time’

Dr Bendor Grosvenor, TV Presenter ‘Britain’s Lost Masterpieces’

Bringing together over 100 works tracing Howson’s career from his student days to the present, the exhibition has been assembled from public and private collections spanning the UK and Europe. Many of the works, privately commissioned from the artist, have never been seen in public. Included in the exhibition is Howson’s first self-portrait since 2008, painted at his Glasgow studio earlier this year in honour of the retrospective.

Spanning four floors, the exhibition includes Howson’s early work, dominated by depictions of working-class Glasgow men – dossers, boxers, bodybuilders. The huge Heroic Dosser from the National Galleries of Scotland is a key painting from this period and hangs alongside images of army life and nightclubs. In 1993 Peter was appointed Official War Artist in Bosnia by the Imperial War Museum, sponsored by The Times, and a section of the exhibition is devoted to this traumatic and harrowing experience.

The upper floors of the exhibition explore Howson’s more recent work. While in the depths of despair and his life at a very low ebb, Peter reached out to God. It was a life-changing moment. Many of the works exhibited on the second-floor gallery are inspired by his ongoing faith journey, including his Stations of the Cross series and numerous paintings never seen in public.