Peter Howson Christ in Hell, 2005

Born in 1958, the brutalist-realist Scottish painter Peter Howson studied at the Glasgow School of Art,  and belongs to the generation of realists who established Glasgow as a significant center of figurative revival in the 1980s. Howson received great acclaim for his monumental paintings of lone outcast figures and tumultuous apocalyptic crowd scenes. He was selected by the Imperial War Museum to be the official war artist in Bosnia in 1993, a commission which affected him greatly. Following this time, Howson had a severe breakdown and battled with acute alcoholism, attributing his recovery to his reconnection with religion. 

Howson's work Christ in Hell, was inspired by Virgil's description of Christ's descent into Hell, from the 14th Century Poem Inferno, by Dante Aligheri. It describes the period following the Crucifixion, before the resurrection, which in Christian theology is called the Harrowing. Of course, as with Sandro Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch's works of the same subject, this is a terrifying portrayal of the horrors of hell, with a fallen angel corralling the writhing figures. For Howson however, it is important that the viewer feels empathy for the characters he depicts within his 'hellscape'. Howson's hoard are crawling and reaching up towards Christ hoping to be granted salvation.

Peter Howson's work has been shown in major exhibitions globally, including Eye on Europe at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006, and The Naked Portrait at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2007. In 2023, the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, presented a significant retrospective exhibition When the Apple Ripens: Peter Howson.

Howson's works are held in numerous international collections including, the British Museum, London, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, the Gulbenkian Collection, Lisbon, the Imperial War Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, the National Gallery of Norway, Oslo, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Tate, London, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.