James Fenwick Lansdowne (1937—2008)

Lansdowne exploded into my world when I was an awkward thirteen, and an exhibit of his stunningly detailed, elegantly fashioned and cleanly executed watercolor vignettes were, with much publicity, exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum. Most were birds, each feather individually portrayed in razor-edge detail. He was 19 but had long since achieved a mastery, a control, I could only dream about. His mother was also an artist and assured that he used only the finest, high-quality papers and other materials. It showed. His mobility was compromised by infantile polio, limiting his field observations I assume, explaining the rather odd poses of birds in some of his work, especially the earlier work, and he was forced to paint left-handed as a result of partial paralysis. Born in Hong Kong, as a child he moved with his mother to a life-time home in Victoria, B.C. Very early on he came under the tutelage of one of the more fascinating figures from my youth, M. F. (Budd) Fehely, an art collector and promotor extraordinaire, best known for his dedicated and highly successful promotion of Inuit art.  He also owned a gallery that featured abstract art, which he also promoted. I met him, a florid, incredibly energetic man “working on my next heart attack” (although he lived to be ninety) who told me he had taken on the realist Lansdowne as a personal challenge, intrigued by the back story – a health-compromised teen-prodigy producing impeccably elegant paintings at so early an age. My mother thought Fehely could take me on, although I lacked the mature control and perfection of Lansdowne.  “If I do promote you,” said Fehely, “I will have to have complete control over what and how you paint.”  That bothered me, a lot. Fehely went on to explain that he had a similar deal with Lansdowne and quickly added, not that he had to, “…but of course the talent was already there.”  Fehely was extremely well connected and moved in the artistic power circles of high society I would never aspire to. From the outset Lansdowne’s market was high end, the fur-draped gem-encrusted social elite. His skills impress me still, he and his imitators being among the most decorative of nature artists, but his influence on my own work was minimal, almost contrarian, since, especially in his earlier work, design dominated ornithological accuracy, and to my eye the birds had something of the unreal quality of a brightly strobe-lit photograph that shows every feather and the most minute detail of the bird, in a way that they eye rarely, if ever, records. It was his feel for design, composition, and color in vignette painting that most appealed to me, thus influenced me. In the end Fehely and I, or my mom who was so anxious for me to be guided by Fehely, did not come to an agreement, be that for better or worse. I greatly admire Lansdowne’s oeuvre.  His strengths allowed him to create exquisite studies of the small, less colorful bird species that usually don’t impress viewers of the paintings in which they occur.  But my world is closer to that of Shortt, Eckleberry, Reid Henry and others who do much of what I want to do better than ever I could and are, I expect, unknown to most proud owners of original Lansdowne paintings, although some of his paintings, such as his Yellow-billed Cuckoo in a spray of leaves, are about as good as bird art gets (at a certain point such evaluation becomes meaningless, only reflecting subjective values and personal tastes), certainly superior to my own attempts at the same species, and perhaps how Audubon might have painted had he the skill of J. Fenwick Lansdowne.