James Giles

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James Giles, born 4 January 1801, was the highly talented son of a designer at the local calico printing factory at Woodside, Aberdeen.

[edit] Life

During his lifetime, Giles was among the first to be mentioned as one of the most vital of the Aberdeen artists - his patrons included the landed aristocracy of Aberdeenshire and Queen Victoria - but he has been little remembered in subsequent surveys in Scottish art. This is due in part to the fact that he spent most of his working life in Aberdeen – unlike his contemporaries who left the north-east to find fame in London.

[edit] Art

Giles was a versatile Victorian artist. He specialised in portraiture and landscape painting but in addition was a successful landscape architect, designing a number of public gardens and monuments in Aberdeen, in addition to landscaping estates in Aberdeenshire.

However, Giles’ spiritual home was Italy where he spent three years from 1823 to 1826. There he followed the well-trodden pathways of the eighteenth century Grand Tour to the many points of historic interest. The bright, Italian light fascinated Giles and all of his sketches are enlivened with an impression of this Mediterranean atmosphere. The sights that he saw and recorded in Italy were to remain with him for the rest of his life. The watercolour sketches often served as an aid for the oils he would paint and exhibit on his return to Scotland.

In his art, Giles possessed an adaptability in both style and treatment of landscape, which reveals itself in a number of aspects: the freedom of the early Italian sketches; the classical grandeur of the later Italianate landscapes; the romanticism of the Scottish landscape; the interrelationship of architecture and its surroundings; ideas about the place of humanity in the landscape and the occurrence of native animals in their natural habitat. All of these aspects have a common constituent in the artist’s professed ethos of taking his inspiration from detailed observation, directly from nature. It is his breadth and variety as a landscape painter, coupled with his devotion to detailed study from nature, that should earn James Giles his niche in the history of Scottish art.