Valentine Green, engraver, spent two years in a solicitor’s office in Evesham before abandoning the law and becoming a pupil of Robert Hancock, an engraver in Worcester. In 1765, he moved to London, and having taught himself mezzotint techniques, he began working in that medium. From 1766, he exhibited with the Incorporated Society of Artists, of which he became a director in 1771. He was appointed mezzotint engraver to the king and to the Elector Palatine, Karl IV Theodor, in 1773, and the following year was elected an associate engraver with the Royal Academy. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, Green's engraving practice flourished. In the 1790s, however, when he had been given permission to engrave and publish pictures from the Gallery in Düsseldorf, his work was curtailed by the invasion of the city by the French army in 1795; his losses there combined with ill-judged investments to render him bankrupt by 1798. From 1805 to his death in 1813 he was keeper of the British Institution. During his career as an engraver he produced some four hundred plates after portraits by Reynolds, Romney, and other British artists, after the compositions of Benjamin West, and after pictures by Van Dyck, Rubens, Murillo, and other old masters.
