watercolourist and sketcher, was born in London, second son of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Brownlow Cumberland of the 96th Regiment of Foot who was posted to Bermuda soon after his son’s birth. Charles was baptised there on 21 February 1828. After successive postings to Halifax and Nova Scotia (Canada), Glasgow (Scotland), Enniskillen (Ireland) and Nantes (France), his father was ordered to Van Diemen’s Land. Charles arrived in the Maria Watson on 8 June 1842 with his parents, four brothers, two sisters and a detachment of his father’s regiment.
On arrival the family moved to the coal mines on the Tasman Peninsula where Colonel Cumberland had been appointed visiting magistrate and commander of the troops. Charles attended Rev. T.E. Richardson’s boarding-school at Richmond and at the end of 1842 was awarded the prize 'for the best sketches from Nature’. He lived in Launceston from March 1843 until 26 August 1846, then left for Hobart Town with some of the family on board the Raven .
At Hobart Town Cumberland became a student of John Skinner Prout and with other pupils joined Prout on sketching tours. Two works from this period, Kangaroo Bay, Hobarton (dated 17 October 1846) and a drawing of a mill on the Cascade rivulet, were done at the same time and place as sketches by Prout and Francis Simpkinson . Together Cumberland and Simpkinson made a sketching trip to Port Arthur in September 1848. Two watercolours of Battery Point (p.c., England), presented by Cumberland to Walter Synnot and inscribed '1850’ by the latter, are more accomplished than his earlier competent, but uninspired, Proutian copies. Some of those are such deceptively faithful transcripts of the master that one sketch by Cumberland (p.c.) has twice been auctioned as Prout’s work.
- Writers:
- Brown, Tony
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
