Lister was the wife of the Birmingham born artist Amos Green (1735-1807), they made numerous sketching tours. Both favoured muted colours and delicate washes of light, Lister's is often more sharply defined in terms of line than that of her husband, whose designs have been described as 'a little woolly'. The park at Hagley was amoung the most famous of the mid-eighteenth century landscape gardens in England, when the taste for such places was that they should appear natural rather than formal. this movement for change was led by the leading architectural and landscape-gardener, Lancelet 'Capabiilty' Brown (1715-1783).