He foresaw his pale body 1990

He foresaw his pale body is the seventh in Hamilton’s ongoing set of illustrations to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (first published in Paris, 1922). The project was begun in the late 1940s and to date comprises seven etchings created during the 1980s (Tate P77473, P77483, P77484, P77491, P77492, P77493, P77494), and a digital print, The heaventree of stars (P78316). Hamilton was first inspired by the idea of illustrating Joyce’s complex, experimental novel in 1947 while he was doing army service and began making sketches the following year, only to put the project to one side in 1950. It was not until 1981 that he made the decision to create one illustration for each of the novel’s eighteen chapters, and a nineteenth image – a portrait of one of the novel’s main protagonists, Leopold Bloom – destined as a frontispiece. He conceived these images as large intaglio prints. However in 1990 the artist became tired of commuting to Paris, where he had been working with the master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck for twenty years, and abandoned etching and other traditional forms of fine art printing. He spent much of the 1990s developing his skill in creating images destined for printing on a computer.