In 2014 Melvin Day generously donated nine self-portraits to the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. Spanning fifty years of his work, these previously unseen self-portraits reflect Day’s shift in style from his early cubist works to his fauvist period and then to his later more realistic work.

Day was at the forefront of developments in abstraction and cubism during the 1940s and 1950s and it was during this time that he painted seven small, intense self-portraits. Rather solemn and introspective, these works are very personal explorations of the self.

Day painted two more self-portraits before he died in 2015. Self-Portrait after Stroke, painted in 2009 after Day had suffered a stroke, can perhaps be seen as a poignant meditation on mortality.

Melvin (Pat) Day 1923 - 2016