Hamilton has spent half a century imagining Bloom

Commissioned and organised by the British Council, it also features a special display of first edition Joyce books and ephemera from a private collection.

The event is the first solo exhibition given to a living artist at the British Museum since 1974 when Henry Moore's illustrations to WH Auden's poems were exhibited.

So far, there are no plans to publish Hamilton's illustrations in an edition of Ulysses.

Richard Hamilton is best known as the father of the pop art movement in Britain.

Barmaids Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy from Ulysses

In fact, it was one of Hamilton's collages - entitled Just What is it That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? - that gave rise to the term "pop" in a visual-arts context.

The collage included a figure holding a lollipop on which the word was written.

The idea of illustrating Joyce's mock-heroic, experimental novel occurred to Hamilton while he was doing his National Service in 1947.

As a student at the Slade art school, in London, he made numerous preliminary drawings and studies with the view to producing etched illustrations to Joyce's text.

Joyce lived all his adult life in exile from his native Ireland

But for technical and practical reasons, the project was put aside in 1950 and only returned to in the 1980s.

Ulysses was first published in Paris on 2 February 1922 - Joyce's 40th birthday.

Living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, Joyce wrote his epic of more than 700 pages in three European cities, Trieste, Zurich and Paris, over seven years between 1914 and 1921.

The book relates the wanderings of Leopold Bloom - a modern-day Odysseus - during the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin.

An elaborate scheme underlies the epic, with each chapter corresponding to an episode of Homer's Odyssey.

The writer himself described Ulysses as "a kind of encyclopedia".