Born at Whittington Hall, near Kirby, Lonsdale, Thomas Sunderland inherited the family estate in 1782. He served as Deputy Lieutenant for Lancashire and helped form the Ulverston Volunteers in 1803 to defend against Napoleon. Sunderland owned an ironworks that served as his primary means of support and financed extensive travels to the Continent and many parts of the British Isles, including Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well as other parts of England.

In addition to advancing the ore industry the region, Sunderland received formal training from the watercolorist John Robert Cozens and pursued landscape painting as an amateur artist, documenting his travels with sketches in pen and ink. His finished paintings were produced primarily in watercolors and reflected the Romantic influence of Cozens and his contemporaries. His work has also been represented (through the addition of counterfeit signatures) as that of the much more influential landscape painter Paul Sandby.