Lower Hutt, the following year. Since that time, Melvin Day's paintings have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. A major survey exhibition, Melvin Day – Full Circle was shown at the Wellington City Art Gallery in 1984. In 1990, Day was encouraged by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Trust to paint Donald McIntyre. In 2011 Melvin and Oroya Day gifted the portrait of McIntyre to the New Zealand Parliamentary Services. Melvin Day is considered a scholarly painter. His work engages with various periods of western art history, exploring philosophical as well as formal concerns. In a 1984 review, Ian Wedde described Day's Uccello series as incorporating "the compositional serialism of Cézanne, the low-key cubism of Braque, perhaps the contemplative lighting of Morandi; sometimes the vertical shafting of planes out of Feininger." In the 2003 New Year Honours, Day was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to painting and art history. In 2004 the major survey exhibition Melvin Day – Continuum was held at City Gallery, Wellington, prior to travelling to Rotorua Museum of Art & History, Rotorua. This was followed in 2005 by Tracing Tasman, which was the inaugural exhibition of the redeveloped Nelson Provincial Museum. During 2007, Melvin Day collaborated with French writer Frédéric-Yves Jeannet and completed a series of work inspired by Vivaldi'sStabat Mater. In 2008 the works were shown at Millennium Art Gallery, in Blenheim; in 2009 at Whakatane District Museum & Gallery; and in 2011 at The Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington, during Easter celebrations. In 2009 Day, along with Nigel Brown, Geerda Leenards, and John Walsh travelled to Fiordland, to respond to the landscape which inspired Cook's artist William Hodges. The journey was documented by filmmaker Peta Carey The Waterfall. Day died in Wellington on 17 January 2016. He had been predeceased by his wife, Oroya, in 2014. An art historian, she was the founding president of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, and was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for services to the preservation of local history, in the 1989 New Year Honours. Legacy Melvin Day's works are found in many national and international public and private collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, The Dowse Art Museum, the Rotorua Museum of Art & History, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the State Services Commission, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the