Timoléon Marie Lobrichon (1831-1914) was one of the most beloved French painters of childhood scenes during the second half of the nineteenth century, whose warmly observed and technically refined pictures of young children secured him a devoted following among French and international collectors. Born in Cornod in the Jura region of France, he pursued his artistic training in Paris under François-Édouard Picot, a leading academic master whose rigorous approach to draftsmanship and composition shaped generations of French painters.

From 1859, Lobrichon exhibited regularly at the Salon, winning a medal in 1868. He showed mainly genre scenes, such as a painting of a young girl with a soldier doll, entitled Premier Amour, included in the Salon of 1872. He won the first place medal at the Salon of 1868, and he also contributed to exhibitions in Germany and Australia, an international profile that reflected the strong demand for his work outside France. Lobrichon's talent for depicting children with great charm and appeal led to several of his works being used as advertisements in magazines of the period, a mark of both his popular success and the accessibility of his imagery. Similarly, in 1884 Lobrichon was commissioned to provide illustrations for Jean Aicard's book La Chanson de l'Enfant, and an original painting for one of these illustrations was sold at auction in 1986.

Though he was justly celebrated as a painter of children, his work was not entirely limited to such subjects. A large horizontal canvas of The Birth of Spring of 1864, for example, was almost certainly intended for a decorative scheme in a Parisian hôtel particulier, as was an oval painting of An Allegory of the Dawn dated 1875. These decorative and allegorical projects show the fuller range of Lobrichon's ambitions and place him within the broader tradition of French academic painting at its most cultivated.

Paintings by Lobrichon are held in the collections of the museums of Besançon, Châlons-sur-Marne, Limoges, and Mulhouse, as well as in the New Orleans Museum of Art. His pictures remain among the most tender and technically accomplished French depictions of childhood produced during the second half of the nineteenth century.