Shortly afterwards he made a tour through Scotland and visited the continent, and on his return home he settled in Aberdeen at 64 Bon Accord Street, where a plaque commemorates him.

Giles was both versatile and shrewd: he excelled not only as a landscape-artist and portrait-painter but also as a town-planner and landscape-designer, designing such notable Aberdeen features as the Demeter Sculpture above Simpson House and the obelisk, now in the Duthie Park, which formerly stood in the quadrangle of Marischal College.

Not only did he design the gardens and parkland of the Earl's estate at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, but after Queen Victoria had viewed a painting by Giles of the old Balmoral Castle, the lease of which had been held by the Earl's younger brother Robert until his death, she decided to lease it without having actually seen what would become her Scottish residence from 1848 on, and in 1852 she purchased Balmoral with its lands.

Some of his finest work is represented by his posthumously published Drawings of Aberdeenshire Castles, commissioned by Lord Aberdeen.

Most of the original pictures are preserved in the James Giles Room at Haddo House, and copies of the entire set were published in 1936 by the Third Spalding Club.

[7] His earliest successes were in portrait-painting, however his visit to Italy gave him a taste for classic landscape, which he never entirely lost, for the mist seldom hangs about his mountains, even when the scene is laid near "dark Lochnagar".

[7] By his first wife, Clementina Farquharson or Ruxton (a widow), he had two sons, James and John, one of whom gave great promise as an artist, but died of consumption at the early age of 21.

[9] 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.

[10] Also at Haddo House, a series of water colour paintings by Giles depicting eighty-five Scottish castles.