Cândido Portinari painted Return from the Fair in 1940, the year of the retrospective exhibition Portinari of Brazil at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Modern Art in New York which garnered great attention and further ushered his international fame. In the painting, an Afro-Brazilian woman and five daughters are depicted in a nocturnal scene of lively revelry set against the vast arid and barren reddish-brown or terra roxa northeastern landscape of his hometown of Brodowski. The monumental yet individualized figures with distorted modeling fill most of the foreground and are shown in various stages of dancing and rhythmic body movements. Elements such as the mast pole scarecrow in the background, a red umbrella, the white dresses with billowing blue sashes, hair flowers and ribbon ornamentation, and the lit lanterns doting the deep dark blue sky suggest the annual popular Festa de São João marking the end of the rainy season and the start of planting and harvest. His characteristic draftsmanship and special emphasis on muscular arms, hands, and expressive gestures point to a cultural celebration of the common people—blacks and mulatos dedicated to toiling the land and fields or engaging in popular feasts—as a quest for a personal vision of a modernist national identity spirit or Brasilidade. Although criticized for these thematic choices in Brazil, Portinari nevertheless established a large international following. A gift to José Gómez Sicre from the artist and his wife, Return from the Fair was presented to the Pan American Union in 1949 marking the first artwork to enter the future permanent collection of the Visual Arts Section and the now Art Museum of the Americas. One of the most significant painters of Latin American modernism at mid-century, Cândido Torquato Portinari became widely known in the United States when the Brazilian government commissioned him to paint three large panels for the interior of the Brazil Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Born on a coffee plantation near the town of Brodowski to poor Italian immigrant coffee workers, Portinari became interested in painting at an early age. Highly talented, he attended the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio while supporting himself by drawing portraits. At age twenty-five he won the Prix de Voyage which allowed him to travel and remain in Europe for two years. In 1935 he submitted the painting Café to the Carnegie International securing a second honorable mention and the next year he joined the University of the Federal District where he met Roberto Burle Marx, then a student. He was commissioned to paint interior fresco murals and to execute an exterior tile mural in the new Ministry of Education and Health in Rio designed by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and others with whom he would maintain long professional relationships. In 1939 the Museum of Modern Art acquired O Morro / Hill of 1933 marking the first Brazilian and South American painting to enter its permanent collection. His 1940 retrospective exhibition Portinari of Brazil featured over 190 artworks and led to the commission by the Hispanic Foundation to paint four murals in the vestibule of the Hispanic Room of the Library of Congress. Portinari first exhibited Return from the Fair at the Pan American Union in the group exhibition Contemporary Latin Americans (April-May 1947) and in his solo exhibition Portinari of Brazil (June 30-August 3, 1947) which featured sixteen paintings and four studies of murals which, due to the limitations of transportation during the war years and after, had remained in the United States with friends such as Beatrice Rudes, then director of the Washington Institute for Contemporary Art.