The Talbot Kellys

Richard Giles Talbot Kelly was an English designer, educator, and writer. Giles was born in 1929 in the middle of England within a hundred metres of the site of the first ever game of Rugby football. His father, paternal and maternal grandfathers were well regarded artists. He was educated in a medieval castle on the Scottish Borders, Rugby School, at the Architectural Association and Saint Martin’s School of Art & Design. He served as an infantry platoon commander at the end in the Korean War.

During his diverse 30+ year design career, in England, Ireland and Canada, Talbot Kelly designed signage, identities and print, textiles, furniture, exhibitions, advertising, interiors, as well as running design departments and doing research into the re-use of workshop waste, dye technologies, and computing for designers.

Apprenticed after military service to the London based exhibition designer James Gardner, he worked in advertising in London before moving to Dublin, where after further advertising experience, he co-founded the first ever design consultancy in Ireland, Group Three, along with Jarlath Hayes and Bob Poole. At the same time, he taught and co-founded Ireland’s first professional design society, Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD). He worked as a consultant to the Irish government before returning to England as Head of Design at what is now Coventry University.

In 1969, he moved his family of seven children to Toronto to work on the (then) new Ontario CAATs. In the early 70s, he cofounded a large format graphic design company with Barry Briscoe, called SuperGrafitti. He was the third director of the School of Design at Sheridan. In the mid 70s he started his own design consultancy, TKA. In 1975 he was retained by the Federal Office of Design to attempt to combine the several design societies into a single, more coherent and viable unit, and at the same time revitalize the GDC under its then president, Carl Brett. In the mid 70s he founded the Carpet Data Centre, in Toronto, where he designed the patterns for and pioneered their dye printing onto synthetic carpets.

In 1977 he returned to England, this time as Head of Design at Middlesborough Polytechnic University. Here he developed major investigations into computing for designers, and initiated and front-ran an international conference on the subject in 1982.

He returned to Canada in 1982, reopening a design practice with two sons, and becoming a Canadian citizen. Reconstituted TKA centred around an innovative 3d modelling and drawing software and hardware system (CAPITOL) that he developed with Dr Graham Webster at Middlesborough Polytechnic University. This technology was central to the varied exhibition and graphic design work TKA was involved in for the next dozen years. Talbot Kelly also taught at York University during these years.

Talbot Kelly largely retired from design in the mid 90s to focus on his first passion, writing poetry. His first volume of poetry is to be posthumously published in 2020.

Talbot Kelly designed advertising for VW, Pan American, Clark’s Shoes, Carlsberg, and Rowntrees; interiors for Powers Whiskey, Irish Sugar Company (ISC), Irish embassies, Irish Management Institute, IBM, 3M, Waterford Glass, Sheridan and Conestoga CAATs, Osgoode Hall, and the 2000-seat theatre for the Irish Transport and Workers Union in Dublin; textiles for hotels, Place Bonaventure, Crown Life, and ISC; furniture for ITGWU, IBM, IMI, ISC, Harrington Group, and retail stores; signage for Conestoga CAAT and retail stores; exhibitions for Battersea Pleasure Gardens, Aer Lingus, and Powers Whiskey; identities and print for Merit Investment Corporation, Shell, York University, IMI, Ian Percy, and Harrington Group; packaging for Beamish Stout, Imperial Tobacco, and Unilever; and research into re-use of workshop waste, dye technologies, and computing for designers.

As he said, “I have devoted my life trying to catch up with my visions, mostly by my own proactivity”.

Giles passed away on September 1, 2006.

Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly

Ornithological artist Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly (born 1927) is the daughter of artist Richard Barrett (TK) Talbot Kelly and the granddaughter of artist Robert George Talbot Kelly. Specialising in watercolours of birds, she began painting in 1945 at the Natural History Museum. Her work tends to favour precision over the sometimes looser and more impressionistic style of her father. Chloe was a founding member of the Society of Wildlife Artists. 

Chloe was married to Jeffrey Smith and they have one son, Alexander Talbot-Smith.

British artist and illustrator R.B. Talbot-Kelly was a hereditary artist. His grandfather Robert George Kelly (1822-1910) was a famous landscape painter who left a lot of canvases of Scottish and Irish landscapes. His father Robert George Talbot-Kelly (1861-1934) was a well-known orientalist painter and writer. His father-in-law was the well know British Pre-Raphaelite painter Edgar Bundy (1862-1922). TK as he was known to his friends, was born on August 20, 1896 in Birkenhead, Cheshire.

Edgar Bundy ARA (1862 in Brighton – 1922 in London) was an English painter.

Bundy had no formal training but learned some of his craft at the studio of Alfred Stevens.[1] Bundy specialised in historical paintings in oil and watercolour, usually in a very detailed and narrative style, a genre which was very popular in the Edwardian time Bundy lived in. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1915 and at the Paris Salon in 1907. In the Tate Gallery is his Royal Academy painting of 1905 entitled The Morning of Sedgemoor depicting the Duke of Monmouth’s rebels resting in a barn before the battle.

Influences in Bundy’s work include Pre-Raphaelites such as John Millais, William Morris and the works of John Ruskin.

A fin de siecle British painter of great versatility, Edgar Bundy was in fact mostly self taught, although as a boy he spent a great deal of time in the studio of Alfred Stevens. A highly respected artist of his time, he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1881and at the Paris Salon from 1907. 

Bundy painted mainly historical costume pieces, and his work is included in many important public and private collections. He painted The Landings of the Canadians in France 1915 for the Canadian War Memorial. 

His daughter Dorothy married the painter Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly in 1924.

Robert George Talbot Kelly (1861–1934) was an English orientalist landscape and genre painter, author and illustrator.

Kelly was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, the son of Irish landscape and portrait painter, Robert George Kelly. He left school in 1876 to take up work in a firm of cotton traders, but was also received an art education from his father, exhibiting under the name R. G. Kelly Jnr.

He travelled to Egypt several times. In the early 1880s, inspired by the places he saw while on vacation on an ocean cruise ship, Talbot-Kelly decided to take up his father’s profession. He left his employment in 1882, travelled by boat to North Africa, and settled in Egypt in 1883, acquiring a studio in Cairo and becoming fluent in Arabic. He travelled throughout the country, writing about and painting the people and scenes he encountered both in towns and in the desert. He spent a considerable time with the Bedouin tribes who he described and illustrated in his 1902 book, Egypt Painted and Described (A & C Black). As his name became known he also earned an income from private commissions. He stayed in Egypt until 1915 when for reasons of health and age he returned to London – though he continued to paint constantly.

Egypt Painted and Described, his first illustrated travel book, was published in 1902 (by A & C Black), and was an account of his impressions and experiences of that country during his long stay there; an exhibition of his Egyptian views was also held at the Fine Art Society in the same year. His paintings and writing showed a great empathy and respect for local people and culture, especially that of the desert Bedouin Arabs.

Kelly provided illustrations for Rudolf C Von Slatin’s description of his time as Governor-General of Darfur in Fire and Sword in the Sudan (1896).

At the invitation of an Icelandic businessman invited them to come to see, research, photograph and paint Iceland with the intentions to publish a book and lecture on Iceland in the UK, Kelly visited Iceland July 4-19, 1890 with a group of nine members. They travelled to Krýsuvík, Hekla, Geysir, Þingvellir.

Kelly travelled to Burma, which he wrote about and painted for two books published by A & C Black, Burma Painted and Described (1905) and Burma (1909). The former contains reproductions of 73 of Kelly’s paintings and the latter contains 12 reproductions, all of which also appeared in the first book.

On his trip through Burma and the paintings he left of the country, Kelly had a significant impact on the early 20th century development of Burmese painting. In Burma, he is believed to have met and taught the basics of Western painting to a major painter of Burma, M.T. Hla (U Tun Hla) (1874–1946), and the paintings of Maung Maung Gyi (painter) (1890–1942) and Ba Ohn (c.1877-fl.1924) show clear influence of Kelly’s style in certain works, to the point, in one case, of an exact replica. The latter two painters may possibly have met Kelly and received some instruction from him, but this would not have been necessary for Kelly’s influence to have occurred. Kelly’s two books were widely available in Burma, or so were postcard reproductions, which were sold in Burma, of the paintings in his books.

Kelly also did fine art reproductions of his watercolors on Burma (dated 1912) which today sell widely on the internet.

Talbot-Kelly worked mainly in watercolour and black and white. He was a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI), Royal Society of British Artists (RBA), Royal British Colonial Society of Artists (RBC) and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS).

Kelly died in London in 1934. He was married and had a son, Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly (1896–1971), MBE MC RI, who was also an artist, specialising in bird painting and historical subjects and an illustrator and who was a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War.

Robert George Kelly, Painter

(b. 1822, d. 1910)

From A Dictionary of Irish Artists 1913

Robert George Kelly was born in Dublin on 22nd January, 1822, the son of Commander Richard Nugent Kelly, R.N., and Eliza, second daughter of Joseph Stringer of Dublin. He was educated at a private school at Stranraer, and made his art studies in the schools of the Royal Dublin Society and the Royal Hibernian Academy. He began to exhibit in the Academy in 1884, and a “Portrait of his Mother” shown in 1847 attracted attention as the work of a young artist of promise. He contributed regularly for several years to the Hibernian Academy exhibitions, painting portraits, subject pictures and landscapes. An early work by him, “Inspiration,” showing the interior of the Academy with a portrait of himself at his easel, is in the possession of his son. In his early days he painted much in Scotland, chiefly in Galloway, and did a number of portraits of Lord Galloway and members of his family as well as of other local personages. In 1853 he left Dublin and settled at first in Manchester and afterwards in 1858 in Birkenhead, where most of his active life was spent.
At Birkenhead he was largely occupied in teaching, and was art master and one of the managers of the School of Art there. He continued to contribute regularly to the Royal Hibernian Academy. A large picture, “The Last Man,” exhibited in 1878, attracted some attention at the time, and a later important picture was his “Elijah running before the Chariot of Ahab.” He was an occasional exhibitor in the Royal Academy between 1856 and 1888, and also contributed to the British Institution in 1853, 1856 and 1859. A picture exhibited there in 1853, “An Ejectment in Ireland,” also called “A Tear and a Prayer for Erin,” was much criticized as a political picture, which the artist never intended it to be, and was actually discussed in the House of Commons. About 1894 Kelly relinquished the active practice of his art, and for the remainder of his life lived quietly at Hollywell House, Parkgate, Chester, until his death at the age of 88, on the 9th May, 1910. By his wife Mary, daughter of Peter Walker, of Stranraer, he had a family of four sons and seven daughters. Of these, R. G. Talbot Kelly, R.I., is the well-known artist and writer upon Egyptian and Burmese subjects.