Background
Green was born at Halesowen, near Birmingham, where his family owned a small property, and was apprenticed to Baskerville, the Birmingham printer.
Green was born at Halesowen, near Birmingham, where his family owned a small property, and was apprenticed to Baskerville, the Birmingham printer.
He was chiefly occupied in painting trays and boxes, but soon developed a love of painting and drawing. His specialty lay in flower and fruit pieces, some of the former being imitations of J. B. Monnoyer and J. van Huysum. Later in life he took to landscape painting with some success.
With another neighbour at Hagley, Anthony Deane, he became so intimate that he was received into his family as one of its members, and moved with them to Bergholt in Suffolk, and eventually to Bath.
In 1760 he sent two paintings of fruit to the first exhibition of the Incorporated Society of Artists, and exhibited again in 1763 and 1765. He died at York on 10 June 1807, in his seventy-third year.
He was buried at Fulford, and a monument to his memory was put up in Castlegate Church at New York His widow published a memoir of him after his death, to which a portrait, engraved by West. T. Fry from a drawing by R. Hancock, is prefixed.
He is sometimes stated to have been a brother of Valentine Green, the engraver, but this does not appear to be the case.
The latter, probably a pupil of the eldest James Basire, engraved plates from William Borlase"s drawings for the "Natural History of Cornwall" (1758), and also views for the "Oxford Almanack," besides some portraits, including one of Doctor Shaw, principal of Street Edmund Hall, Oxford.
He was a good landscape gardener.