After twenty years as a member of the program in art history, Charles Talbot retired from Trinity University at the end of the Spring 2007 semester. Dr. Talbot came to Trinity in the Fall of 1986, after having been on the faculties of Smith College and Yale in the departments of the history of art for a decade each. He also taught for a year as guest professor at the University of Hamburg. As an undergraduate he majored in art history at Princeton, then following a stint in the artillery, went to Yale for graduate work.

His teaching and research interests have concerned primarily the art of Germany, the Netherlands and France from the middle ages to the Baroque. After coming to Trinity, he caught the Mexico bug and began studying and teaching the art and architecture of New and Old Spain. The questions that have nagged him most insistently are about the way the arts of sculpture, painting and printmaking interact, often with architecture as the arena for such interaction. Taking a long view, these questions pertain to the consequences of the rise and dominance of pictorial media, from brushstrokes to pixels, in modern society.
He has published a number of catalogues on prints and drawings for exhibitions (National Gallery, Washington; Yale Art Gallery; Detroit Institute of Arts) and in collections (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; and the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). In his retirement, Dr. Talbot continues to work on a book on how Albrecht Dürer made printmaking a form of high art and on another book more or less about the function of “excess” in the Spanish/Mexican Baroque retablo.