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An outstanding painter of the early 20th century, Timótheo da Costa was from a humble family from Rio de Janeiro. His employment at the Mint made him meet the director Enes de Souza, who was a patron and who helped him pay for the National School of Fine Arts. He was contemporary of big aesthetic changes: the departure of a classicist academicism to a liberating modernism. He traveled to Europe thanks to his talent, where he absorbed seventeenth-century influences (Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Rubens) and mixed them with his contemporaries. He died of mental illness in the Hospice of the Injured.