Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, regarded by many as the greatest novel of the 20th century.
This month also sees the 80th birthday of Richard Hamilton, a founding father of pop art in Britain, who has spent much of his life working on illustrations for the homeric day and night long wander through the city of Dublin.
All the drawings, watercolours and etchings for Ulysses, never before displayed together, go on view at the British Museum tomorrow to mark the double anniversary, making Hamilton the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the museum since Henry Moore in 1974.
Hamilton made his name with a satirical collage in 1956, still much parodied in interior design features, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? While his big, brilliantly coloured pop canvases in the 1950s influenced a generation of younger artists including David Hockney, his hobby was Ulysses, begun in pencil in 1947, most recently worked on his computer 18 months ago.
"The final line is not yet drawn," he said yesterday, "I've got lots more ideas in my head."
The project, like Bloom's story, is a triumph of optimism over experience. His 1932 Odyssey Press edition went with him on military service with the Royal Engineers. In 1948 Hamilton, by then a Slade student, took his first portrait of Bloom to an editor at Faber and Faber - TS Eliot - who was discouraging.
"He said resetting the entire book to include illustrations would be prohibitively expensive, and that no publisher would be remotely interested in the work of an unknown student. I was a bit cast down. I kept going, but I never really showed it to another publisher."
The exhibition and catalogue show dozens of drafts and preparatory sketches for each finished image. In order to make the most recent image, Leopold and Molly Bloom dreaming in their brass bed with the jangling knob, he photographed his own wife, Rita Donagh, lying in bed with his studio assistant Nigel McKernaghan, and later scanned in a star map with a washstand floating among the constellations, and draped a bed cover crocheted by his mother over the sleeping couple.
"I think this is my favourite - but I always think that of the most recent one I've made", he said.
