Jonathan Talbot was raised (1939-1949) sixty miles north of New York City on a farm belonging to his mothers family. The location of the farm is called Quaker Hill and is part of the ridge which divides New York State from Connecticut. The road to the Talbot home was unpaved and, because gas was rationed during World War II, farming was done with horse pulled wagons and machinery. Recollections of the bucolic vistas and rural surroundings of his childhood inspire Talbot's landscape paintings.

Talbot's childhood artistic efforts were encouraged by his mother, who had studied art at Skidmore College and subsequently in Munich and Frankfort, Germany. Her surviving drawings and a few multiples reveal that she had considerable talent but, despite having some exhibition opportunities in Manhattan and some positive press, her efforts to make a name for herself were, like those of so many women of her generation, thwarted by the sexist atitudes of the art world of that time. Still, Talbot's mother socialized in artistic circles and, in the summer of 1947 at age of seven, Talbot, in exchange for serving as a model for noted painter and illustrator Arthur Lidov, received his first non-familial art lessons. The portrait Lidov painted of Talbot, ominously reminiscent of David Alfaro Siqueiros' "Echo of a Scream", eventually appeared on the cover of the December 1947 issue of The American Mercury, a magazine which had been founded by H.L. Mencken.

Talbot spent the summers of his youth (1950-1958) living in the fishing village of Menemsha on the island of Martha's Vineyard. During those Vineyard summers, Talbot got to know artists Vaclav Vitlacyl and Thomas Hart Benton. Talbot was able to watch artist Stevan Dohanos paint a picture of the general store in Menemsha which later became a cover of the Saturday Evening Post. But, despite his interest in art, Talbot spent most of his time sailing. On a variety of craft, from a twelve-foot spritsail-rigged lapstrake double ender to an eighty-foot running-backstay Alden-designed schooner, the future artist became intimately acquainted with Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands, and the waters southeast of the portentiously-named island "Noman's Land." A few years later, Talbot sailed Mediterranean waters on a four-hundred ton barquentine, the Verona, sailing out of Marseilles. These nautical experiences continue to inform Talbot's seascape paintings sixty years later.

Talbot lives in Warwick, NY, the former home of Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey and, more recently, artist Fredrick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing. The broad lowland fields of Warwick's "Black Dirt" region and the gentle hills of the dairy lands bordering the Wawayanda Creek are sources of inspiration for Talbot's paintings.