Louis-Charles TIMBAL
Paris 1821 - Paris 1880
Biography
An academic painter, art critic and collector, Charles Timbal was a pupil of Michel-Martin Drolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he entered in 1842. Timbal exhibited at the Salons between 1847 and 1869, receiving a second-class medal in 1848 and a first-class medal in 1861. As a painter, Timbal specialized in religious subjects, and worked in numerous churches in Paris, notably at Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and the chapel of the Sorbonne, as well as elsewhere in France. In 1864 he was named chevalier in the Légion d’Honneur, and also won medals at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts and Industry in London in 1872 and at the Weltausstellung in Vienna the following year. From 1871 onwards he published art reviews in the daily journal Le Francais. Timbal was also a noted collector of Renaissance paintings and sculpture, owning works by Fra Angelico and Mino da Fiesole, as well as a drawing by Raphael. In 1872 he sold some 150 pieces of sculpture, reliefs, bronzes, medals and paintings, assembled over a period of some twenty years, to the collector Gustave Dreyfus; this acquisition was to form the nucleus of Dreyfus’s own renowned collection. Timbal continued to collect after 1872, however, forming a second collection which was acquired, for 207,000 francs, from his heirs by the Louvre in 1882. Paintings by Timbal are today in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, and elsewhere.
