Endellion Lycett Green (b. 1969) is a British painter based in Wiltshire, widely celebrated for her commanding large-scale figurative works that bring the wild world of plants, meadows and flora to vivid, luminous life. Over a career spanning more than 25 years, she has developed a singular visual language — one rooted in deep botanical knowledge and precise observation — that sits at the captivating threshold between figuration and abstraction.
Lycett Green grew up entirely immersed in the natural world, her childhood shaped by time spent outdoors, running through cow parsley and field maples in the company of her mother, the celebrated author, journalist and conservation campaigner Candida Lycett Green. That early, instinctive love of nature became the bedrock of her artistic vision. As a teenager, it was an encounter with Lucian Freud’s intense, unsettling portrayals of plants that first ignited a passion for painting — a reminder that the natural world could be rendered with psychological as well as visual power. She went on to study Fine Art and English at the University of Exeter (1988–1991), where she developed the academic rigour and love of language that continues to inform the poetic quality of her work.
For much of her career, Lycett Green devoted herself entirely to painting plants — not as botanical record, but as a means of expressing her profound love of nature and her fascination with structure, texture and form. She favours plants of strong architectural presence: Solomon’s Seal, eryngium, artichokes, hosta, wild orchids — subjects she studies with patient, meticulous intensity before committing them to canvas. Taught to handle oils by the acclaimed painter and educator Robin Child, former Head of Art at Marlborough College, she developed a deep respect for the medium and its demands. Her characteristic bluey-green palette — what she describes as “browny, misty, bluey, glaucous green” — gives her canvases a cool, immersive atmosphere, as though the viewer has stepped inside the foliage itself.
In recent years, Lycett Green has expanded her practice in a profoundly personal direction, weaving abstraction into her plant-based work as a form of pure self-expression. The loss of her mother proved to be a catalytic moment, propelling her into what she describes as the wordless, anti-figurative world of paint — a space where she can explore its physical qualities as raw material rather than as a vehicle for representation. Seeing Barnett Newman’s work at Tate Modern was a further revelation, igniting her interest in Abstract Expressionism and the power of colour and scale to carry emotional weight. She now works with an expanded material repertoire — paint, charcoal, sand and gold leaf — and approaches composition as a physical, active process rather than a static one. For Lycett Green, abstraction offers freedom: freedom from the viewer’s expectations, and freedom to excavate states of feeling that resist the legibility of the figurative.
Lycett Green has exhibited widely across the United Kingdom, showing at prestigious venues including the Lefevre Gallery and Browse & Darby Gallery, as well as a celebrated solo exhibition — her first in a decade — at the Tithe Barn at Thyme in the Cotswolds in 2024, presented in collaboration with the Laura Lopes Gallery. Her work features in numerous private and corporate collections and is on permanent display at Chatsworth House. She has been published in Vogue, Tatler, Town & Country, Wiltshire Life and Christie’s magazine, and was featured in Artists & Illustrators. Now in her fourth decade of life as a painter, Lycett Green continues to push the boundaries of her practice — finding in each new canvas both the wild, rooted beauty of the natural world and the raw, unguarded territory of personal expression.
