Between 1944 and 1945, Portinari created a five-canvas series nearly as an offshoot of his Religious Series. When shown in Paris, in 1946, the paintings Dead Child, Dead Child, Migrants, Northeastern Migrants, and Burial in a Hammock were met with a praiseful review by Germain Bazin. At present three of these works are conserved in the Masp Collection, and a version of Dead Child, in the Musée d’Art Moderne, of Paris. Although less daring than the Religious Series, the series in question brings opposing formal solutions spanning from an intimate dialogue with Siqueiros in Burial in a Hammock, to personal solutions as in Dead Child, the series’s masterpiece, in which the child figure features the ultimate expressiveness of Cosme Tura.

— Unknown authorship, 1998