Nikolai Efimovich Timkov was born on 12 August 1912 at a settlement of Nakhichevanskaya Dacha close to Rostov-on-Don, Russian Empire.

In 1927, Nikolai Timkov finished 8 grades of secondary school and enrolled in the Rostov Art College, which was headed by A. Chinenov, who was landscape painter, a pupil of Vasily Polenov and a big fan of Isaac Levitan.

At the same time he taught himself at the Tretyakov Gallery and did much plein air painting, occasionally heeding the benevolent advice of Mikhail Nesterov and Sergey Malyutin.

At Radimov's apartment he met Isaak Brodsky, who played a big role in the fate of the artist.

[4] In one year with Timkov Institute graduates Piotr Belousov, Mikhail Kozell, Lev Orekhov, Aleksei Gritsai, Elena Skuin, Gleb Verner, Lia Ostrova, Boris Sherbakov, and other young artists who later became famous Soviet painters and art educators.

Formation of his individual creative style proceeded gradually, as experience and lessons learned in the process of communicating with your colleagues and numerous creative travel to the Volga River and Don River, in Staraya Ladoga, the Urals, the work in Wira and Christmas village near Leningrad, on the Academicheskaya Dacha.

In the first post World War II decade, Timkov style developed and improved in areas identified during the years of study.

In landscapes of Don and Volga he tends to cover a larger space with the image of the set clearly legible plans that is in line with general trends in the genre of these years.

But the sketch in those years was considered only as auxiliary material for landscape painting, with its large size, an essential genre-narrative beginning with the careful selection and meticulous attention to detail and alignment of the composition.

Not surprisingly, therefore, that at the solo exhibition of 1957 in the Leningrad Union of Artists, as later in Rostov on Don, Timkov appears as a gifted and serious professional, whose work is however still does not go beyond the tenets and practices that existed in the Soviet landscape painting of 1940-1950s.

They traced the obvious development of the creative artist's manner from traditional plein air painting aside impressionistic enrichment and refinement of color, enhance decoration, styling and some conventions of the drawing.

Colourful range of his works in 1960 become extremely broad, its coloring a ringing and decorative, but not local, and subtly linked to relief, with the expressive possibilities of the canvas surface, texture, smear.

In this period the spectacular talent of Nikolai Timkov fully disclosed in all kinds of creativity – from large landscape painting to nature studies of small forms.

After a successful exhibition of 1975, Timkov continues to work actively in Valentinovka village located near Academicheskaya Dacha, as well as his Leningrad studio in a house on the Pesochnaya Embankment 16.

From now until the end of life the majority of his works will be created in the village of Valentinovka] and its surroundings near the Vyshny Volochyok town in Tver Oblast.

He devoted two monographs published in the U.S.[40][41] Exhibitions of his works were held in San Francisco (1998, 2000, 2001), Aspen (1999), New York (1999, 2001), Scottsdale (2000), Palm Beach (2000), Vail (2001), Washington (2001) and other cities.