The Timken Museum of Art is a fine art museum located in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, close to the San Diego Museum of Art.
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The museum, whose construction was funded by the Timken family, opened in 1965 with a small collection owned by the Putnam Foundation.[1][2] The core of the collection was purchased by sisters Amy and Anne Putnam, who had settled in San Diego in the early twentieth century and made donations to the San Diego Museum of Art in its early years. They later created a nonprofit foundation which loaned their subsequent purchases to noteworthy museums across the United States.[1][2]
Shortly after the museum opened, John Walker, of the National Gallery of Art, praised its collection, some of which had been on loan at his institution until construction on the Timken neared completion:[1]
"It is one of the finest small museums I have ever seen...I congratulate you on the discrimination shown. You have been wise. Some cities have built large museums, and then hoped that innumerable works of art of true excellence would miraculously appear. I am aftaid they won't any longer. Money is not the problem. The problem is to find pictures to buy. I can't replace those which have come to San Diego. Paintings like these are virtually unavailable at any price."[1]
The museum, a five-room gallery in marble and bronze designed by architect Frank Hope, displays a significant collection of European old master paintings, sculptures, and tapestries under natural light.[1][3] Supplementing the European holdings are collections of American painting and Russian icons.
The holdings include works by American (Copley, Johnson, West, Cole, Bierstadt), Italian (Savoldo, Veronese, Guercino), Spanish (Murillo), and French masters (Clouet, Claude, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Corot), as well as works of the Flemish and Dutch schools, including masterpieces by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, and Frans Hals. The Timken is the only museum in San Diego that owns a Rembrandt in its permanent collection.[2] Acquisitions have expanded the collection from the original forty to sixty major works.[1][2]
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