The heaventree of stars 1998

The heaventree of stars is a black and white image, showing a man and a woman lying in a bed top-to-toe under a crocheted bedspread. Above them the hazy night sky is full of stars, represented by white spots of different sizes. The stars are variously accompanied by their names and single Greek characters. Adding to the dreamy atmosphere, an old-fashioned jug in a bowl on a washstand floats at an angle in the sky. The print is the most recent addition to 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), plus this digital print. 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, after creating He foresaw his pale body (P77494), Hamilton became tired of commuting to Paris, where he had been working with the master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck for twenty years, and abandoned etching. He spent much of the 1990s developing his skill in creating images destined for fine art printing on a computer.