Talbot Hughes was the son of still-life painter, William Hughes and brother of Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton, a landscape painter in oil and watercolor. He lived in London and later in Osmington, near Weymouth, Dorset. His painterly subjects ranged from the allegorical, figurative, and historical to the theatrical. He admired the style of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, a French classicist painter. Hughes was preoccupied with the refinement of the presentation of his subject and the depiction of idealized feminine beauty and the tribulations of romantic love. In a 1902 article in The Magazine of Art, writer Marion Hepworth Dixon commented on Hughes's "dexterity of hand, the extraordinary facility with which he renders the different surfaces of stuffs, woods, and metal, together with the agility of his outlook and the verve and spontaneity of his eighteenth century designs." Some of the titles of Hughes's submissions to the Royal Academy included "Temptation" (1899), "Fate leads the willing, and the unwilling drags" (1900) and "The Road of Love" (1900).

As was the custom of late Victorian and Edwardian genre painters, Hughes had amassed an extensive collection of historical costumes and accessories as studio props dating from the 16th century through the 1870s. The collection of sacques, flowered brocades, high-heeled mules, and full-bottomed wigs was donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum after it had been exhibited at Harrods department store in 1913. Harrods used Hughes's collection to advertise women's contemporary fashions to customers. He dressed his models in the costumes in his collection, styling their hair and adding accessories to match.Samples of Hughes's costume collection remain on public view at the V&A to this day in the British Galleries - 1500-1900, opened in 2002.

The same year that Harrods donated his costume collection, Hughes published his major study, Dress Design: an account of costume for artists and dress makers, illustrated by the author from old examples. In 1928, art and antiques dealer Philip Rosenbach, purchased Hughes’s collection of 450 miniature portraits. Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia mounted an exhibition of 30 of his Spanish portrait miniatures in 1988.