The New Glasgow Boys

Peter Howson, The Heroic Dosser, 1987, Oil on canvas

The New Glasgow Boys were a new generation of bold, young figurative painters who all studied at The Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, producing work on a heroic scale often taking their subject matter from working class Scotland. They went on to achieve national and international success and helped ignite the revival in figurative art in Scotland at a time when American Abstraction, Pop and conceptual art dominated western art. The success of this group has been an important factor in Glasgow’s cultural renaissance of recent decades.

Stephen Campbell, Gardening Barbers Debating in a Small Airplane Garden , 1985, Oil on Canvas

The Group composed of Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski and late Steven Campbell. Howson and Currie often chose to represent aspects of social deprivation in Scotland while Wiszniewski and Campbell showed more interest in environmental concepts having started in the Environmental Art Department at The Glasgow School of Art before moving to the Painting Department.

James Guthrie, Highland Funeral (1881-1882)One of the Glasgow Boys of early 1880s

The New Glasgow Boys is a follow on from The Glasgow Boys of the early 1880s who came together to formed an informal alliance that challenged the formulaic landscapes and narrative subjects of late Victorian Scottish painting, and developed a distinctive style of naturalist painting.