‘A Stormy Sea’, a Large Seascape by David James

#18341: ‘A Stormy Sea’, a Large Seascape by David James
British, dated 1892
Canvas: Height 63cm, width 127.5cm, depth 2cm
Frame: Height 96cm, width 160cm, depth 12cm

This wide-format oil on canvas by David James shows a line of rollers breaking over rocks under an overcast sky, a three-masted ship on the horizon.
A line of rollers advances from the left across the full width of the canvas and breaks over a group of rocks at the right, where the stone is half-hidden by surf.
Above, a sky of soft grey cloud fills the upper third of the composition, with a pair of gulls in flight against it. On the far left, a sailing vessel stands on the horizon, its small scale giving a measure of the waves in the foreground.
The sea is built up in layered strokes of blue and green-blue, and the crests and spray are laid on in thick white paint. The brown surfaces of the rocks are worked with darker accents where the water runs off them.
The canvas is signed and dated lower right ‘D. James 92’, and titled, signed and dated on the reverse ‘A Stormy Sea / D. James 92’. It is presented in a carved giltwood frame with rope-twist and foliate mouldings and pierced acanthus cartouches at the corners and centres.
Open-sea views of breaking waves, often with no shoreline or figures, form the core of David James’s work. ‘David James’ was a pseudonym: he was born Joseph Donahue, the son of a London porter, and worked for a time as a pavement artist in London. A German-born picture dealer then supported his training, and James lived with the dealer’s family for much of his life. Active from the 1870s, he painted the North Sea at Great Yarmouth, the cliffs of Flamborough Head and, in the late 1880s, the Pembrokeshire coast, but returned most often to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Like the marine painter Henry Moore, he concentrated on the sea itself rather than on topographical views of the coast. He exhibited four works at the Royal Academy between 1886 and 1897, from addresses in Dalston and later Maida Vale, and his ‘Blown on the Wind’ is in the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich. His last known work is dated 1904. With a single line of breaking water and a distant ship as the only sign of human presence, the painting shows the elemental treatment of the sea on which his reputation rests.
$37,500