The son of a schoolmaster, William Green embarked initially on a career as a surveyor, contributing to a survey of the County of Lancaster in 1778. His interests, however, lay increasingly in landscape drawing and watercolour. He opened two drawing schools in his native Manchester, and in the 1790s produced a series of 'picturesque views' of the Lake District, Wales and the north of England. He moved briefly to London before settling at Ambleside in about 1800. Here he devoted himself to exploring and depicting the mountainous scenery of the Lake District, producing etchings as well as drawings and watercolours of the region. In his 'Exhibition and Sale Rooms' at Ambleside and Keswick he sold his prints for as much as 20 guineas a pair. The trees of Rydale Park were one of his most popular subjects. He befriended William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, and compiled The Tourist's New Guide to the Lake District in 1819, in which he proposed to 'save from the wreck of time and the busy hand of man the best specimens of this mountain architecture '.
Green used fugitive pigments and many of his large watercolorus are badly faded. The present drawing is in exceptionally fine condition.