Fernando Botero, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Medellin, the industrial and commercial center of Columbia; a small provincial city high in the Andes mountains. His father, who died when Fernando was four, was a salesman who traveled on horseback into the mountains to work. Botero had an uncle who sent him to a school for matadors.

Botero's first painting was a watercolor of a matador. As an adolescent he discovered "Esquire Magazine" and the Vargas girls and decided that he was going to be an artist, even though that meant that he would always be poor.

He was expelled from his Jesuit high school for his "irreligious" ideas after he wrote an article on Picasso and Cubist fragmentation. He was sent to a government...