Summer Evening, Broad Haven Sands

David James specialised as a painter of rocks and crashing waves, depicting geological elements and atmospheric conditions with minutely observed detail. In this painting he shows the sea in the background and the rocks revealed by the tide in the foreground, bathed in the serene clear glow of warm evening light. With his close observation to detail James focuses the viewers’ attention on the rocks, worn and weathered by the sea and glistening with wet seaweed.

James travelled and painted in the British Isles from the Norfolk coast to Yorkshire. His paintings of the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales, location of Broad Haven Sands, made him commercially successful but much of his work was done in Cornwall.

David James was the pseudonym of Joseph Donahue, the fourth child of a London porter and a probably Irish mother. He was born in Ireland in 1853 and moved to Dalston, Cumbria in his twenties, when he changed his name to David James. He had little education and for a while, eked out a meagre existence as a pavement artist in London until his talent attracted the attention of a German-born picture dealer, who supported his training and with whose family he lived much of his life.

James exhibited throughout London and at the Royal Academy.