Te Papa-bound: With Jeffery Harris' painting, 'For a lady', are Te Papa art courier Mark Roach, who's about to pack it up, and Seifert Gallery owner Leah Seifert. PICTURE: JAMES ALLAN PHOTOGRAPHY

A Vineyard-based Queenstown gallery’s sold seven paintings by New Zealand’s most prolific artist, Jeffrey Harris, to Wellington-based national museum, Te Papa.

Born in 1949, Dunedin-domiciled Harris has painted every day since he turned 18.

The paintings, sold by Seifert Gallery, at Gibbston’s Cox’s Vineyard tasting room, include one of the largest paintings ever made of his former wife, the late Joanna Paul, an artist and pioneering woman of her generation whose reputation’s grown hugely.

‘For a lady’, painted in 1982, depicts Harris declining an art dealer’s invite to move to New York, where he’d have become a famous international artist, because of his devotion to Paul and his three children — the couple divorced later that year.

“It makes sense that it has gone to our national museum because it represents one of the most important phases of Harris’ careeer,” says gallery owner Leah Seifert, whose dad Marshall Seifert originally collected most of these works.

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