His work has encompassed a number of themes. His early works are typified by very masculine working class men, most famously in "The Heroic Dosser" (1987). Later, in 1993, he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum of London, to be the official war artist for the Bosnian War. Here he produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time, like "Plum Grove" (1994). One painting in particular, "Croatian and Muslim", detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the victims' accounts. He was the official war painter at the Kosovo War for the "London Times".