George Cumberland (27 November 1754 – 8 August 1848) was an English art collector, writer and poet.

[3] He made use of his wide circle of connections to help its other members,[4] in particular assisting and influencing Edward Bird[5] and Francis Danby.

[1] The young Cumberland held radical views; with Stothard and Sharp, he joined the Society for Constitutional Information,[8] becoming a friend of its leader, John Horne Tooke,[9] and attracting the attention of government spies.

As early as 1780 a contribution by Cumberland to the Morning Chronicle praised Blake's first exhibit at the Academy, the watercolour The Death of Earl Goodwin.

[7] In Rome he joined a circle of artists which included John Deare, Robert Fagan, Charles Grignion the Younger and Samuel Woodforde.

[16] In the same year he published Some Anecdotes of the Life of Julio Bonasoni, prefaced by A Plan for the Improvement of the Arts in England, which contained a proposal for the formation of a national gallery.

He called his utopia Sophis, setting it in Africa, and gave it classical Greek virtues but without war, slavery or sexual inequality.

Fearing that its radicalism would antagonise the authorities, Cumberland withdrew the novel,[19] though not before he had sent a copy to another of his acquaintances, Isaac D'Israeli.

[5] Cumberland believed that painting should be directly from nature;[21] he produced small landscape studies which avoided the picturesque.

[4] In 1820 when Francis Danby exhibited The Upas Tree of Java at the British Institution, Cumberland exerted his influence to promote its favourable reception.

Its subject is reminiscent of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, while the work's neoclassical figure of a girl evokes Cumberland's Thoughts on Outline.

[21] A later watercolour, A Scene from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1832) is very reminiscent of Blake's illustrations for The Book of Thel.

[26] Cumberland had been the recipient from Blake of one of the 16 early copies of The Book of Thel[27] and one of For Children: The Gates of Paradise, only five of which now survive.

Blake did so by surrounding Cumberland's name with figures intended to represent the Seasons, including children hoop rolling and flying kites.