David Talbot-Rice Archive

Mavi Boncuk |

David Talbot-Rice[1] Archive [2]

All images currently available from the David Talbot-Rice Archive can be reached here.Images are made available under a Creative Commons licence permitting non-commercial, no derivatives reproduction with attribution.

[1] David Talbot Rice CBE (11 July 1903, Rugby - 12 March 1972, Cheltenham) was an English art historian. His father was "Talbot-Rice" and both he and his wife published using "Talbot Rice" as a surname, but are also sometimes found under "Rice" alone.
Born in Rugby and brought up in Gloucestershire (England), he was educated at Eton prior to reading archaeology and anthropology at Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford his circle of friends included Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton as well as (Elena) Tamara Abelson (1904–1993)[*] the renowned Byzantine scholar and lecturer at Columbia University whom he was to marry in 1927. This relationship introduced David Talbot-Rice to Byzantine history, which along with the art history of the east Mediterranean and Middle East, remained a lifelong passion.

Following his undergraduate degree Talbot-Rice undertook a tour of the east Mediterranean, visiting and participating in a series of excavations of major Byzantine sites, including of monuments in Istanbul and Trebizond.

His expertise in the area of Islamic art was recognised when, in 1932, Samuel Courtauld endowed the Courtauld Institute at the University of London and Rice was among the first appointments, taking up a position as lecturer.

In 1928 David Talbot Rice, gentleman and scholar, and his new bride Tamara set off from Oxford to excavate the Great Palace of Byzantium.

Rice was subsequently appointed to the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh in 1934, a post he held until his death in 1972. During World War II, he served as Head of the Near East Section of Military Intelligence (MI3b), which was responsible for Eastern Europe including Yugoslavia but excluding Russia and Scandinavia. Originally commissioned on the Special List in 1939, he transferred to the Intelligence Corps in 1943. He ended the war as a Major.

When peacetime returned he came back to Scotland and established an Honours degree at the university which combined art history and studio art and is still offered today. His ambition to establish an arts centre in the University was realised posthumously when the Talbot Rice Gallery was founded and named after him. From 1952 to 1954, he led the excavations of the Great Palace of Constantinople in Istanbul, Turkey.

[*]  (Elena) Tamara Abelson (1904–1993) Author and Art Historian. She was the daughter of Israel Boris Abelevich Abelson, a businessman and finance officer to the czar, and Louisa Elizabeth Abelson. She was raised in privilege by governesses, she was a god-daughter to Leo Tolstoy. She attended the Tagantzeva Girls' School in St Petersburg until the Revolution in 1917 forced her family to flee, she and her mother to Finland and eventually to London and Paris. In England, she briefly attended Cheltenham Ladies' College and St Hugh's College, Oxford, in 1921 before transferring to the Society of Oxford Home Students, now St Anne's College. 

"Her closest women friends were Christine Trew (1900-1980), later wife of sixth Earl of Longford, and Elizabeth Winifred "Jane" Martin (1902-1976), who later married the art historian Kenneth Clark. These women were the first generation of post-World War I female Oxfordites, disparagingly known as ''undergraduettes.'' Abelson failed the Oxford Home Students and was dismissed in 1924. After returning to her now impoverished family in Paris, she worked variously as a film extra, journalist, and traveled to New York where she was employed as a researcher for Professor Carlton Hayes of Columbia University." (SOURCE)

During World War II, she worked in the Ministry of Information in London in the Turkish division. After the war, she resumed publishing, with The Scythians in 1957, The Seljuks in Asia Minor in1961, and Everyday Life in Byzantium in 1967.

[2] Shortly after his death, Talbot-Rice’s widow donated his archive of photographs, slides and papers to Prof. Anthony Bryer at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies (CBOMGS) at the University of Birmingham in recognition of Birmingham’s preeminent role in Byzantine studies. Prof. Bryer and Tamara Talbot-Rice placed the archive in the care of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts to foster links between the Centre and the Barber Institute and to ensure that the archive received appropriate public attention.

The David Talbot- Rice archive consists of photographs and slides, in particular related to his excavations and travel in the east Mediterranean, and a selection of personal papers. It contains unique records of a number of monuments and artefacts which no longer survive or which have been heavily and controversially restored since David Talbot-Rice’s preliminary surveys and photographs. 

David Talbot Rice
by Howard Coster
print, 1953
8in. x 6 1/4in. (202 mm x 153 mm)
Given by the estate of Howard Coster, 1959
National Portrait Gallery Photographs Collection

NPG x3436

In addition to images, the archive also contains texts of around 100 of David Talbot-Rice’s private letters to colleagues and collaborators in art historical scholarship, the texts of lectures delivered during his research career and notes made during excavations. The former provide a unique insight into the personal relationships and discussions which underpinned and structured the published output of a generation of leading scholars of Byzantine art history at the point when the field was emerging as a separate discipline. The latter represent the only record of lectures which both expressed Talbot-Rice’s views on the subject and directly informed the development of the subsequent generation of Byzantine art historians.