Richard Hamilton, Study for Leopold Bloom for James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

This drawing was made as part of a series of illustrations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1922), responding to a passage in the ‘Lotus-Eaters’ episode where Leopold Bloom imagines himself in a warm bath, his genitals ‘a languid floating flower’. Around the central image of the bath Hamilton draws various attempts at the genitals, hands, feet and face, side by side in order to compare them in different attitudes. Different types of flowers are explored, as well as a mushroom. He also tests the limits of the pen nib with a series of vigorous marks, blotches and zigzag lines.