Howson came to prominence in the late 1980s with a series of satirical portrayals of individual and institutional violence. In 1993, as Official War Artist, he accompanied a British contingent of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force to Bosnia, where he saw the human and material damage left by the recent bitter civil war, following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The artist has stated that he felt compelled to go to Bosnia after being horrified by news reports of the outrages committed in ‘what seemed a barbaric, almost medieval conflict’.

Many of the paintings which resulted from Howson’s experience in Bosnia depict scenes of appalling degradation including images of rape, castration and impaling. The paintings expose the brutality of war in a matter-of-fact and unsanitised way. In Plum Grove, which depicts children playing alongside a castrated, hanging soldier, a tense contrast exists between the brightly coloured, sunny countryside and the atrocities committed within it. The painting combines scenes which the artist had actually witnessed with Croatian accounts of the treatment of their men by their Muslim captors. His works are non-partisan, however, addressing the individual cruelty and suffering that underlay the internecine ethnic conflict.

When he saw the paintings, the then Bosnian Prime Minister, Haris Silajdzic, commented: ‘Sometimes the normality and violence [of war] are so closely joined that they become the same thing. A child goes to fetch water from a pump; what could be more normal than that? But if, while he stands at the pump, there is a 50-50 chance that he will be killed by a mortar shell, what he is doing is both normal and terrible at the very same time. What seems brutal in these paintings is also an expression of truth…there is no possibility of illusion in a war like this.’

Peter Howson was born in 1958 in London, and grew up in Scotland. He lives and works in Glasgow.