This piece is clearly influenced by religion. Howson grew up in a religious family and his work often returns to themes such as crucifixion. Whilst there is a depiction of Christ on the cross in the background, he is not the main focus of the piece. Howson has said he was “intrigued” by the story of Brother Walfrid, the founder of Glasgow’s Celtic Football Club in 1888, and admits he had no knowledge of Irishman Walfrid before undertaking the commission. “I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t even know he was the man who started Celtic – I’m an Ayr United supporter. The whole point for me was to get across an anti-sectarian message. Famine is not just about Irish Catholics, Protestants died too and famine still kills people today. If this makes people think, then that will be something.” He said: “The green in the painting was a conscious decision and makes me feel Brother Walfrid’s connection with Celtic Football Club.”

The Irish Famine influenced Peter Howson in the creation of ‘Brother Walfrid: The Founder’. He said: “There are famines all over the world and I don’t think a lot of people realise we had one in this part of the world. Many people don’t know what happened – the politics of it all and the fact people were basically left to starve. The Irish Famine is a very powerful episode in our history. Some of the figures look grotesque – but that’s what I do, and poverty and famine are grotesque. Throughout history, artists like Bruegel and Goya were interested in grotesque imagery because it goes right into the soul of people. They are alive to me. I feel as if I know them and the pain that comes off them. They appear from all over the place, from Bosnia, The Holy Land and the streets of Glasgow. They appear from the Irish Famine. They turn up again and again.” And he claims that too few people appreciate the horror of the famine which ultimately led to Celtic’s foundation.

Strongly influenced by witnessing the brutal and personally harrowing realities of combat as an official war artist during the Bosnian Civil War in 1993, Howson’s paintings have since been founded on increasingly nightmarish visions of chaos and atrocity, and populated by a cast of fantastic, grotesque characters.

Howson’s emphatic distortions of form, scale and colour can be traced to the influence of German Expressionism, particularly the works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.

Howson says his influences include Picasso and Cubism, Surrealism including Salvador Dali, plus Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. In this piece, the influence of Surrealism is particularly evident due to the exaggerated, grotesque figures surrounding Brother Walfrid. Surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, also included religious figures in his works, a recent subject of Howson’s paintings. This piece is also reminiscent of Dali’s dream-like (nightmare-like) creations, featuring strong tonal contrast, highly blended paint, and dramatic clouds in the background.

Howson was inspired in 1996, by reading Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the novels of John Buchan, to explore through in his works the strength of the human spirit

In this particular painting, Peter Howson was influenced by the life of St. John Ogilvie. John Ogilvie was a Scottish Catholic Jesuit martyr, born in 1579 in Drum-na-Keith, on the north east coast of Scotland. At the age of 12, Ogilvie travelled to Germany to be educated. In the midst of the religious controversies and turmoil that engulfed Europe during that era, he decided to become a Catholic, aged 17. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1599 and was ordained a priest at Paris in 1610. At his request, he was sent to Scotland to minister to the few remaining Catholics in the Glasgow area (after 1560 it had become illegal there to preach or otherwise endorse Catholicism). He began to preach in secret, celebrating Mass illegally in private homes. In October 1614, Ogilvie was discovered and arrested in Glasgow and was imprisoned. He was initially treated well, but after continually refusing to confess, was imprisoned and tortured. He was hanged and drawn at Glasgow Cross on 10 March 1615, aged thirty-six.

This piece is clearly influenced by religion. Howson grew up in a religious family and his work often returns to themes such as crucifixion. He decided to work on the John Ogilvie painting, saying “…hopefully, it will help bring people together” due to him being “a Protestant working for the Catholic Church.” The painting was originally supposed to include a crowd scene, but Howson eventually decided to paint St. John Ogilvie alone. “It’s more devotional”, he says, “and with no bloodthirsty onlookers it won’t upset Catholic–Protestant relations.” (Howson describes himself as an ‘unhappy Protestant’, caught between the Church of Scotland and Catholicism.)

The finished portrait of St. John Ogilvie, which hangs in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Glasgow’s St. Andrew’s Cathedral, embodies the endurance and suffering of the Saint whilst demonstrating Peter’s enduring ability to represent religious scenes in the manner of the Renaissance masters, whilst infused with a modern perspective. The saint was defiant to the end, flinging his rosary beads out into the crowd. He had been tortured for several days, but refused to give names of any other Catholics. He was put through terrible trials, but he kept his faith. Howson sees his life on the same scale. “The closer you get to God,” he says, “the more the devil wants you too.”

Peter Howson experienced many challenges – professionally, personally and spiritually – in trying to achieve the finished painting. When Peter began his series of proprietary sketches he had only two or three drawings from which to base his representation of Ogilvie on, but has stated that with the help of books and documents on the Saint – as well as moments of spiritual insight and inspiration, he was able to realise his vision. Peter has expressed that his aim was to represent John Ogilvie the ‘man’ – whom he believed to have been witty and humorous- and, in purely humanistic terms, he set about achieving a face for the saint.

The artist has stated that he regards the finished painting as “something of a miracle”; during the two year period that it took to complete the finished work, Howson suffered a complete physical breakdown and a prolonged period of depression. He has since likened the experience to being in a war zone and at times felt he would be unable to find the strength to complete the work. He started hallucinating and, lying awake at night, he saw what he describes as ‘devils, demons and goblins’. They told him there was no point in living; that he might as well do away with himself. It was, he says, probably the worst time of his life. He felt as if he had been abandoned by God. He decided that getting back into the studio to work on the painting would be the best thing for him. “The best cure for depression,” he said, “is to devote yourself to work.” "It was going to be a lot bigger, and it was going to be one of the largest crowd scenes in art history, but I worked on a painting for about nine months and then in one moment I completely destroyed it”. Howson said. "It's a dark period. I fought my way through this, but I'm still not completely out of the woods," he added.

Peter Howson has been influenced by a number of artists in his work. Howson’s emphatic distortions of form, scale and colour can be traced to the influence of German Expressionism, particularly the works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. He also says his influences include Picasso and Cubism, Surrealism including Salvador Dali, plus Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci.