Portinari painted more than five thousand canvases, from small sketches to monumental works such as the Guerra e Paz panels, which were donated to the United Nations Headquarters in 1956.

Portinari developed a social preoccupation throughout his oeuvre and maintained an active life in the Brazilian cultural and political worlds.

Born to Giovan Battista Portinari and Domenica Torquato, Italian immigrants from Chiampo Vicenza, Veneto, in a coffee plantation near Brodowski, in São Paulo.

[1] During his time in Europe Portinari did little painting, but studied the works of various European artists, visited museums, and met his future wife, Maria Martinelli.

He came back to Brazil fully set on conveying the true Brazilian lifestyle and capturing the pain and struggles of his people through his art.

[2] After his return, Portinari began portraying the reality of Brazil, from its natural beauties to the harsh lives of the country's most impoverished populations, pursuing an amalgamation of his academic formation with the modernist avant-gardes.

The rise of fascism in Europe, the wars and the close contact with Brazilian problematic society, reaffirmed the social character of his work, as well as conducting him to political engagement.

[2][failed verification][6] On December 20, 2007, his painting O Lavrador de Café [pt][7] was stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art along with Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

[2] Portinari was capable of transcending his original academic formation by experiencing with and absorbing modernist techniques and styles, which fundamentally created his painting personality.

The range and sweep of his output includes paintings depicting rural and urban labour, refugees fleeing the hardships of Brazil's rural north-east; and, despite these major and better known aspects of his work, treatments of the key events in the history of Brazil since the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, images of childhood, portraits of members of his family and leading Brazilian intellectuals, illustrations for books and tiles decorating the Church of São Francisco at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte.

Portinari's works can be found in galleries and settings in Brazil and abroad, ranging from the family chapel in his childhood home in Brodowski to his panels Guerra e Paz (War and Peace) in the United Nations building in New York and four murals in the Hispanic Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.[10] As previously mentioned, Candido Portinari came from a poor immigrant family.

This painting is also a great depiction of "realism" because of how he captures his people with the short bodies, rounder heads and the brown and red hues of the land.

War and Peace (Guerra e Paz; Gustavo Capanema Palace in Rio de Janeiro; 1952–56) was a mural created when the United Nations asked Brazil to donate a work of art.

This work is located in the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York which was created in remembrance to World War II and its horrors.

His painting, like his militant political views, spoke out against injustice, violence and misery in the world, according to the artist's son, João Candido Portinari.

Entry in the Forest is the "reminiscent of frescoes" where he also doesn't fail to capture his style of enlarging the figures’ arms and legs to show their strength.

"[18] Life in Brazil wasn't easy for Portinari, especially considering he was never wealthy, but his desire to show proof of this reality is evident in all his artworks.

Poor housing, inadequate nutrition, no education, little or no healthcare access and various diseases created desperate situations for the Brazilian people who struggled to survive.

Not only was his son able to locate more than 5,000 paintings, he also found thousands of drawings, sketches, and documents related to Portinari's life and travels and interactions.

Nicolás Guillén's and Horacio Salinas's ‘Un son para Portinari’, famously performed by Mercedes Sosa, is dedicated to the artist.