Tony Giles

Giles, though a trained cartographer, was a self-taught artist. Based in his beloved Cornwall from 1961, Giles painted compulsively from his home in St Agnes, in between working on his garden which he transformed into a fantastical landscape for his model railway.

Born in a railway workers cottage in Taunton in 1924, his father has been an engine driver on the Great Western Railway and trips down to Penzance as a child had cemented his love of the railway and of Cornwall itself. It is unsurprising then, that trains feature heavily in Giles’ work.

Giles was interested in the way man had shaped the Cornish landscape, and his work often features viaducts, tunnels and harbours. Though Giles’ work certainly possesses what might be described as an “untutored charm”, it is also highly individual and full of life and atmosphere, for all its deceptive simplicity.