Timm was a Russian painter, illustrator and lithographer of German descent. He began his career as a painter of battle scenes while studying under Gottlob Sauerweid (1783–1844) at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, although his first independent work was as an illustrator. In 1840–44 he produced drawings for a satirical publication in St Petersburg, and some of his work was used as official nationalist propaganda. Timm’s highly distinctive style influenced the later illustrative work of Aleksandr Agin (1817–75) and Pyotr Boklevsky (1816–97). His work also influenced numerous artistic and literary ‘physiological’ studies of St Petersburg in the mid-19th century. Timm continually renewed his personal impressions of urban life and was influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, Paul Gavarni and Aleksey Venetsianov, although he was blamed by many of his contemporaries and later cultural historians for lack of discrimination when choosing texts for illustration. In 1843 he became friends with Horace Vernet who was working in Russia at the time, and they travelled to Algiers together. Timm then lived in France for a time, but at the onset of the 1848 revolution he was forced to return to Russia. Numerous travel sketches served as a basis for the most important project of his life, Khudozhestvennyy listok (‘The art newspaper’), which was published three times a month from 1851 to 1862, with the participation of Vasily Shterenberg, Grigory Gagarin, Ivan Ayvazovsky, Aleksey Bogolyubov, Mikhály Zichy and Mikhail Mikeshin. The illustrations were printed in two colours at first but were eventually produced in four to five colours after Timm developed his own method of lithography (1861). The newspaper served as a kind of artistic chronicle of Russia, with reproductions of paintings by Aleksandr Ivanov and Karl Bryullov, portraits and war reportage. Publication ceased when Timm’s sight deteriorated. He also tried his hand at ceramics.