Johann Heinrich Lips – Odysseus at the Gates of Hades, 1785 | Giclée Print

Odysseus has dug the pit at the edge of the world and poured the offering, and the dead have come up to it. He stands with his sword drawn — in Homer he keeps the shades back from the blood until the seer Tiresias has spoken. At his feet a veiled woman reaches towards him: his mother Anticlea, who died while he was away and whom he may not touch. Behind her the armed dead wait their turn; at the left the crowd of shades presses in, drawn in thin brown ink and left half-finished, as though they were not quite there.

It is Book 11 of the Odyssey, the passage that gave the underworld to European literature. Lips drew it in 1785 in pen and brown ink over grey wash, with ruled framing lines — a finished sheet, not a study, of the kind an engraver made when the print was the point.

Who made it. Johann Heinrich Lips (1758–1817) came from Kloten near Zurich, made his name engraving the plates for Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente, and later worked in Weimar in Goethe's circle. A Swiss draughtsman's Greece, drawn from Homer and from casts, at the moment when neoclassicism was becoming the common language of Europe.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks — not a drawing, and not sold as one. The original is a unique sheet in Chicago.

Scale
Original: 45.4 × 67 cm / 17.9 × 26.4 in — Art Institute of Chicago
100 × 70 cm / 39.4 × 27.6 in — original size, 1:1. Image 67.54 × 46.41 cm.
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.87× original. Image 58.80 × 40.11 cm.

At original size the sheet is the size Lips drew it, ruled border and all. The smaller sheet is a reduction, not an enlargement — we never scale a drawing up beyond what the file honestly carries, and here it does not need to be.

The drawing is reproduced whole, including its ruled framing lines and the tone of the blued-white laid paper. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Johann Heinrich Lips (Swiss, 1758–1817), Odysseus, at the Doors of Hades, Meets the Shades of Tiresias and Anticlea, 1785; pen and brown ink and black ink wash, with brown ink wash, on blued-white laid paper, 45.4 × 67 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Day Blake Endowment Fund, Acc. No. 2023.3178.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.