James Fenwick Lansdowne, OC OBC RCA (August 8, 1937 – July 27, 2008) was a self-taught Canadian wildlife artist.
[1] Lansdowne was born in Hong Kong of English parents and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia.
Stricken with polio at eleven months, he was nurtured by his mother, Edith Lansdowne, to walk.
[2] Later, in high school, the staff of the Royal British Columbia Museum encouraged him in studying birds, and gave him a job as a laboratory assistant for three summers.
[3] His detailed watercolours of birds have frequently been compared with the work of John James Audubon – they often feature a specific species against a largely white background – but his subjects tend to display a greater lifelike quality and more natural postures than Audubon's.