David James is best known as a painter of dramatic ‘pure sea’ breaking-wave compositions, which are characteristically either of a predominantly blue or green tone. He also did coastal subjects with incidental shipping, generally earlier in his career: his recorded settings go as far north as Bradda Head, the Isle of Man and the Bass Rock but most are in the West Country including the Isles of Scilly, in South Wales and more occasionally on the south coast of England. Research by Dr Andrew Mill has now established that ‘David James’ is in fact a pseudonym, his real name being James Donahue (or Donoghue) and that he was the son of a London porter, John Donahue, who was probably Irish, and his wife Mary (née Welsh). The April 1861 census shows that he was then seven months old and the youngest of their four children, living at 27 Mary Street, Poplar, in Tower Hamlets.
The boy’s talent was recognized by Selley Jacobi, a Berlin-born picture dealer, who became James’s benefactor and to whom he was apprenticed as an artist. A so-far unverified report suggests that, through Jacobi, he may also have attended the Slade School. In 1881, with another apprentice Charles Savage, James was living with Selley and Louisa Jacobi and their seven children at 6 Great East India Dock Road, Limehouse.
Jacobi died in 1884, aged 54, and James moved to 17 Albion Square, Dalston, Hackney (not Dalston, Cumberland, as mistakenly stated in Archibald’s Dictionary of Sea Painters). It was from here that he first exhibited a view of the Man-of-War Rocks, Scilly, at the Royal Academy in 1886 and a North Cornish Breaker in 1888. By 1892 he had rejoined the Jacobi family at 9 Blomfield Road, Maida Vale. His An Atlantic Roll – perhaps the best known of his pure sea studies – was shown at the RA that year and a further work, Coming home, was his last exhibit there in 1897.
His last known work of over 500 recorded by Dr Mill is dated 1904, and it is presumed that he died in that year or shortly afterwards. A so-far uncorroborated family story records that they heard nothing of him after 1897 until one day he returned to them in Limehouse in a state of great mental disturbance, having walked barefoot all the way from Maida Vale. He drank glass after glass of water and was locked in an upstairs room while they summoned medical help. By the time this arrived, however, he had thrown himself out of the window and died on the pavement below.
Summarised in May 2008 from research notes by Dr Andrew Mill, filed in the National Maritime Museum artist records and used by permission.
Text source: Art Detective
