printed on Rives paper at the Atelier Crommelynck, Paris and published by Waddington Graphics, London; a masterpiece of printmaking; Hamilton and Crommelynck used the 'sugar lift' technique in the aquatint which technique the studio had developed for Picasso and which David Hockney also used for prints made at Crommelynck;
The plate is a tour de force of lift ground aquatint. After the first delineation of the subject in soft ground etching, the composition was elaborated with carefully timed acid bites applied to the plate by brush and swab rather than by immersion in a bath. There is some stipple, some line etching and a little tidying up with the burin (Hamilton in Imaging Ulysses the catalogue for the exhibition in the British Museum, February - May 2002)

James Joyce's novel Ulysses fascinated Hamilton since he first read it in 1949 and over the ensuing years he made many works illustrating characters and scenes from the book. In Horne's House depicts the episode Oxen of the Sun when Leopold Bloom and some of his cronies drink while waiting in Dr Horne's house for the birth of the child of one of them; Hamilton has brought in allusions to other periods of history and culture; in the lower left corner one of the group is shown as an early Easter Island sculpture and another as an Egyptian relief; Punch Costello is shown as the young Rembrandt, Stephen Dedalus as Napoleon from the portrait by Gros; the nursing sister in the background as a figure from a Bellini painting and Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of the book as Paul Cézanne; the etching was the culmination of preliminary studies made over the previous 30 years