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Fenwick Lansdowne (1937 - 2008)  

Artist Info

J. Fenwick Lansdowne was born in Hong Kong in 1937, the only child of British parents having a long association with Asia. When only 10 months old, Lansdowne suffered a polio attack which left him partly paralysed. At the age of three, he came with his family to Canada and as he grew older, he developed an early interest in birds and drawing. “I had more time on my hands than most small children because I could not get around,” says the artist. “But I would have watched and painted birds anyway. I had a passion for them. From the age of seven, I knew my birds.”

Lansdowne inherited his ability through his mother, herself an accomplished artist. Although he had no formal training, by the age of twelve or thirteen Lansdowne had combined his two great interests, birds and drawing, to produce his first paintings. So skillful were his drawings that he spent many summers skeletonizing and cataloguing specimens at the Royal British Columbia Museum as a young man and has continued to paint and draw birds ever since.

The artist’s work first attracted national attention in 1956 when John A. Livingston arranged an exhibition of forty watercolours at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Within a few years, Lansdowne would hold one-man exhibitions in the Audubon House and the Kennedy Galleries in new York and at the Tryon Gallery in London. Since then, his paintings have appeared in many major shows and in galleries in Canada, the United States, Britain, Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australia.

His paintings have been shown at the American Museum of Natural History and the Historical Society in New York, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum and many others. In the late 1970s, the Smithsonian Institution mounted a two-year traveling exhibition of forty-two paintings entitled, Rails of the World.

Lansdowne’s paintings are in many private and public collections including those of the Bronfman Foundation (Canada), MacMillan Bloedel (Canada), the Beaverbrook Museum in Fredericton, NB (Canada), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada) and the Ulster Museum (Belfast, Northern Ireland).

In 1967, one of Lansdowne’s painting was presented by Lester B. Pearson on behalf of the Canadian Government to H.R.H. Prince Philip and in 1977 a painting was a Jubilee gift from Canada to H.M. Queen Elizabeth. A painting entitled “Canada Geese” was commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces as a wedding present to Prince Charles and Princess Diana and another hangs in the residence of the United States vice-president.

Fenwick Lansdowne was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1977 and, in 1979, was given an honourary Doctor of Law degree from the University of Victoria. In 1995 he was made a member of the Order of British Columbia, the highest award in the province.

In 1980, Lansdowne started working on an eight-year project which entailed painting thirty-two watercolour paintings of endangered birds entitled “Rare Birds of China”. This series of thirty-two original paintings, and the collotype prints produced from them to the highest standards by the famous Viennese printing house Jaffe Habarta, have been shown in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taiwan, and the New York Historical Society in New York City.

Lansdowne’s work may be best known to the public through his completion of a series of seven books, several of which were both written and illustrated by him, including: Birds of the Northern Forest (1966), Birds of the Eastern Forest (two volumes, 1968 and 1970), Birds of the West Coast (two volumes, 1976 and 1980), and the Rails of the World (1977).



For inquiries:
Ph: (403) 261-1602

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Email: stephenloweartgallery@shaw.ca