Peter Howson Underground Series Holland Park Print, 1998

Peter Howson was born in London in 1958 and moved to Scotland as a young child. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and rose in the 1980s to become a leading member of a group of young artists known as the New Glasgow Boys. Howson was both a painter and a printmaker. In 1998 he undertook a series of drawings from life titled The Underground Series, the sketches predominantly of male heads rendered in an arresting grotesqueness likened to the work of Goya. Held in many collections around the world, it is not hard to see why Howson's distinctive style has become so popular.