Ottawa art lovers Harvey Benoit and Dr. Lynne Freiburger-Benoit enjoyed the art of hyper-realist Ron Mueck so much, they wanted more of it to remain in their hometown.

They have donated more than $500,000 toward the purchase of A Girl, a huge Mueck sculpture of a newborn baby, to the National Gallery of Canada.

Ron Mueck's sculpture, with, from left, Jonathan Shaughnessy, National Gallery assistant curator, NGC Foundation president Marie Claire Morin, donors F. Harvey Benoit and Dr. Lynne Freiburger-Benoit and NGC director Pierre Théberge.

The Ottawa-based gallery showed 16 sculptures by the Australian artist in a spring exhibit organized in collaboration with the Paris-based Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain.

"We were intensely moved by the exhibition on a visual and an emotional level and amazed by people's response to the works on display," Benoit said in a statement.

A Girl is a 4.5-metre-long sculpture of a newborn, her eyes half shut and hands clenched, and umbilical cord still attached.

Mueck uses modern acrylics and other sculptural techniques taken from the film industry to create the true colours and textures of human skin, but all of his sculptures are out of scale — either much larger or smaller than their inspiration.

"And, as parents, we viscerally connected with A Girl. We simply want to give others the opportunity to feel and share the emotions this amazing sculpture provokes," Benoit said.

The couple say they were so taken by Mueck's work and in particular by  A Girl, they wanted to help the gallery buy it.

Their donation is the largest the gallery has ever received toward a single work of art, said Marie Claire Morin, president of the National Gallery of Canada Foundation.

The gallery refused to disclose the full purchase price of the work.

A Girl is now on public view at the National Gallery, which already owns two other works by Mueck — Head of a Baby (2003) and Untitled (Old Woman in Bed, 2000).

The artist, who now lives and works in London, became an international sensation in 1996 with Dead Dad, a mixed-media sculpture of the corpse of his father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale.