During the last 10 years of his life, commercial artist Graham Percy set himself free to draw whatever he chose.
His fertile imagination had him roving between Europe and the New Zealand where he grew up. He drew Sigmund Freud advising a New Zealand settler on a land sale and young Austrian archduchesses playing in the black sand of a Taranaki beach.
A large collection of his commercial and non-commercial drawings are on show at the Sarjeant Gallery, in The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy.
It's up until January 29 and is curated by Gregory O'Brien.
Four of the pictures in it belong to the Sarjeant, donated by Percy's widow.
Sarjeant assistant curator Sarah McClintock said that was brilliant because Percy was so talented and was reasonably unrepresented in New Zealand collections at the moment.
The artist, designer and illustrator was born in Stratford in 1938, studied art at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and was a School Journal illustrator in the early 1960s.
He left for London when he received a scholarship and stayed there the rest of his life.
He married photographer Mari Mahr, lived in Wimbledon and earned his living by all kinds of illustration.
He illustrated books, wrote and illustrated books for children and was the art director for the 90-minute animated film Hugo the Hippo - a smash hit in Russia in 1973.
About 10 years before his death in 2008, he stopped doing commercial work and drew what he wanted. Some of it is laugh-aloud funny.
"What I like is how whimsical and creative it is. A lot of it is very personal," Miss McClintock said.
The Sarjeant show includes many of his later drawings and a copy of the hippo film.
It's the first show of his work to be held in New Zealand, and it's fitting that it should be here.
"He was very aware of himself as an artist and what it meant to be a New Zealand artist," Miss McClintock said.
Sarah McClintock
Sarah McClintock started her assistant curator job at the Sarjeant Gallery in mid September.
Her previous job was at Archives New Zealand and her masters degree in art history focused on C H Howorth.
"I very much like contemporary art, however my degree was on an early twentieth century landscape artist who funnily enough lived for about 15 years in Wanganui and was in the first exhibition ever held at the Sarjeant," she said.
Half her role was to help with public programmes and the other half was documenting and taking care of the Sarjeant collection - "making sure we know where everything comes from".