Alan Robert Melbourne Sumner MBE (10 November 1911 – 20 October 1994) was an Australian artist; a painter, printmaker, teacher, stained glass designer and WW2 Royal Australian Air Force veteran.

Alan Sumner studied at Melbourne's National Gallery Art School in 1933, at Melbourne Technical College, and from 1933 to 1939 at the George Bell School,[1][2] then 1950–52 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris and the Courtauld Institute, London.

He painted in a post-impressionist style influenced by George Bell, which he applied in his work as a stained glass artist; he was commissioned for around 100 stained glass works, most important of which are the windows for the Services Memorial Chapel, Scots Church, Melbourne, and the memorial window for Charles Joseph La Trobe in Chapelle de l'Ermitage, Neuchatel, Switzerland.

[4] Very late in life Sumner was recognised in the exhibition Classical Modernism: The George Bell circle at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992,[5] and the simultaneous exhibition of his screenprints at Eastgate Gallery, Melbourne that demonstrated facility in the medium in which he would use up to 17 screens on the one print.

His instruction and personal style was influential on a number of significant Australian artists, Barbara Brash, Dorothy Mary Braund, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, Janet Dawson and Ian Lee Burn among them.