Portinari was born on 29 December 1903 on a coffee plantation here, the child of Italian immigrants who had come to work the terra roxa — the deep red soil that made this corner of São Paulo state rich in beans and poor in almost everything else. He grew up among coffee rows and the people who picked them, and those people never left his painting. In his mid-teens he went to Rio de Janeiro to study at the national fine arts school. A travel prize at the end of the 1920s carried him to Europe. He came back with a modernist's technique and an unfashionable subject: Brazilian farm labourers, migrants, cane cutters, children with distended bellies and enormous bare feet. "I am a son of the red earth," he said, and he painted like someone settling a debt to it. Brodowski sits at 861 metres, 305 kilometres inland from the city of São Paulo. It was never the kind of place that produced international artists. It produced this one.

The family house is unremarkable at first look — the plain, low-slung construction of the countryside, a main building with annexes added as the household grew. Then you notice the walls. Portinari returned here throughout his life, and every visit seems to have ended with pigment on plaster. He worked directly onto the walls in fresco and in tempera, using the house as a laboratory for mural technique, testing how lime and paint behave together long before he committed to a public commission. Nonna's chapel in the garden is the most complete of these experiments, but the murals run through the rooms as well. The effect is domestic and disarming: not a gallery, but a home where the painter could not stop working. This is why the house was protected rather than sold off. The national heritage institute IPHAN listed it on 9 December 1968, the state expropriated the property the following year, and the São Paulo heritage council added its own protection in January 1970.

Portinari's last great work was a pair of enormous panels, Guerra e Paz — War and Peace — completed in 1956 and given to the United Nations headquarters in New York the same year. His son later described the arithmetic of them: four years of studies, then nine months of painting. Doctors had already told him what the lead in his pigments was doing to his body and instructed him to stop. He did not stop. He was assembling roughly two hundred works for an exhibition in Milan when the poisoning finished its work, and he died on 6 February 1962, aged fifty-eight. It is a hard fact to hold alongside the chapel in the garden — that the same paints which let a grandson build his grandmother a place to pray were quietly killing him the entire time.

The Museu Casa de Portinari opened on 14 March 1970, and the town has organised itself around it ever since. Brodowski holds an annual Semana de Portinari; the museum's rooms — the bedroom, the drawing room, the fresco room, the kitchen — are shown much as the family used them, with the murals in place rather than framed and hung. Visitors come out from Ribeirão Preto, twenty-odd kilometres south, and from further afield. The rest of the municipality goes about its business: 278 square kilometres of farmland, 25,201 people counted in the 2022 census, a population that grew about nineteen percent in the preceding twelve years, much of it families trading the city for cheaper land and quieter streets. Coffee still surrounds the town. So does the red earth. It is easy to underestimate a place of twenty-five thousand people until you stand in a garden chapel and recognise the neighbours in the faces of the saints.