Arthur Lismer CC RCA (27 June 1885 – 23 March 1969) was an English born-Canadian painter, member of the Group of Seven and educator. He is known primarily as a landscape painter and for his paintings of ships in dazzle camouflage.

Lismer was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, the son of Harriet and Edward Lismer, a draper's buyer. At age thirteen, he apprenticed at a photo-engraving company. He was awarded a scholarship, and used this time to take evening classes at the Sheffield School of Art from 1898 until 1905. In 1905, he moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where he studied art at the Academie Royale.

Lismer immigrated to Canada in 1911, settled in Toronto, Ontario, and took a job with Grip Ltd. where he met Tom Thomson. In May 1914, he went camping with him in Algonquin Park, writing about the trip:

Our canoe was a 16 footer Chestnut, canvas covered, roomy & capable of carrying the weight we had to put in it, stores for two weeks, tent, blankets, a cooking oven and utensils, plates and pannekins of aluminum, fishing tackle, axe, & sketching impedimenta, this last consisting (for me) of two dozen 12 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 three ply veneer boards of birch wood back and front & soft pine inside, & good for sketching. These fit into a holder designed to carry six & two more into a flat sketch box, also about 12 to 15 pounds of paint, oil, brushes per man. When our canoe was fully laden, we had about 2 1⁄2 inches of free board above the water line & with our two selves about 560 lbs. in all.

At thirty-one years of age, Lismer moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1916 and served as the Principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design (now NSCAD University). With only twelve students when he began his principalship, Lismer was able to increase the student body to 150 pupils by the time he resigned in 1919.

With the goal of broadening the public reach of the art school, Lismer created new programs including Saturday morning art classes that he would re-create at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). In addition to his teaching and administrative duties, he held the curatorship of the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts located at the Victoria School of Art and Design.

In wartime Halifax, Lismer was inspired by the shipping and naval activity of the port, notably the dramatically painted dazzle camouflaged ships with their patterns of curved and zigzag lines designed to mislead German U-boats and submarines. Lismer's work came to the attention of Lord Beaverbrook who arranged for Lismer to be commissioned as an official war artist. His best-known work from the war years depicted what he observed and learned about in Halifax, Nova Scotia: Mine sweeping, convoying, patrolling and harbour defense. Lismer completed a number of oil studies and finished several major canvases during 1918 and 1919. These included the large and ebullient Convoy in Bedford Basin (c.1919), which depicts merchant ships forming a transatlantic convoy near Halifax. He also did some sketches of the Halifax Explosion.

During his time as a war artist, he wrote a booklet for the Canadian Armed Services titled How to get started: Watercolor Painting for Pleasure.