Printer: Mourlot

Dimensions: 65 x 44 cm

Condition: Very good 

Frame: Oak 

Artist: Candido Portinaro (1903 - 1962) was a Brazilian painter of Italian descent and widely regarded as one of the most prominent painters in Brazil. He was born in 1903 on a coffee plantation in São Paulo to poor Italian immigrant coffee workers. He studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro while earning money as a pencil portraitist. In 1928, at the age of 25, he won the Prix de Voyage and travelled to Europe. He did little painting but visited museums, studied the works of various European expressionists and cubists and met his future wife, Maria Martinelli. He came back to Brazil fully intent on exposing the true Brazilian lifestyle and capturing the pain and struggles of his people through his art.

Growing up on the land of dark soil and blue sky, Portinari claimed his inspiration came straight from the homeland he loved. In the majority of his later paintings, murals and frescoes, he used the colour blue and many browns and reds. He said, “I am the Son of the Red Earth. I decided to paint the Brazilian reality, naked and crude as it is.”

Portinari painted more than five thousand canvases, from small sketches to monumental works such as the Guerra e Paz War and Peace panels, which were donated to the United Nations Headquarters in 1956. He developed a social preoccupation throughout his oeuvre and maintained an active life in the Brazilian cultural and political worlds. He died in 1962, aged 58, as a result of lead poisoning from his paints.