TO paint this week's cover portrait of Brazil's President Janio Quadros, TIME chose Brazil's most renowned artist. Candido Portinari, 57, has spent his life, as he puts it, painting "the Brazilian people being born, living and dying, in their rituals and feasts, at their work and play." Portinari's work has been in the pages of TIME'S ART section on several occasions, and he has also painted Brazilian Presidents Getulio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek, but this is his first TIME cover. Delighted at the assignment to paint his President, he recalled that he once painted a cousin of Quadros', and told her: "You have all the beauty in the family. There wasn't a centavo's worth left for Janio."

Reporting the story from Brazil was the assignment of George de Carvalho, 40, an American of Portuguese descent who has reported on the Brazilian people for three years as chief of TIME'S Rio de Janeiro bureau. De Carvalho and a staff of a dozen full-time and part-time correspondents ranged wide over the vast expanses of Brazil, conducted 150 interviews from the chief of the President's Cabinet to his schoolteachers. Following the President around Brazil, De Carvalho was on hand in the town of Florianopolis one morning at 6:30 when Quadros emerged for a busy day, looked at the reporter, and asked in some astonishment: "You here already?" Before his task was completed, De Carvalho had sent to New York a report that exceeded a massive 85,000 words.

From other Latin American countries and from Washington, TIME correspondents filed assessments of the Brazilian President by top diplomatic and government officials. At TIME'S editorial offices in New York, still more material was gathered by Portuguese-descended, Portuguese-speaking Researcher Berta Cordeiro Gold. All the mass of research went to the desk of Contributing Editor Peter Bird Martin, 31, who has followed the course of Latin American events for six years as a TIME writer. His story (his fifth TIME cover), edited by Senior Editor George Daniels, was the final product in an intensive combination of talent, experience and effort through which TIME brings its readers the most definitive report to date on the President of South America's greatest and most complex country.

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