Somewhere I have a couple of neat letters from the artist Richard Chopping, politely declining my requests to interview him about Ian Fleming. ‘Dicky’ is best known for the trompe l’oeil dust jackets he painted for nine of Fleming’s James Bond novels. Because of this patronage, an accomplished second-division artist gained wider prominence, becoming at one stage, according to the New Yorker, the world’s highest paid book designer.
It didn’t make him happy. He was involved in a long, bickering relationship with his fellow artist Denis Wirth-Miller, who was wilder and more experimental, but whose reputation, despite a close working association with Francis Bacon, has not endured so well.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller were a couple of sociable gay painters who flitted through various phases of British art for more than 50 years from the mid-1930s. They knew everyone, from Nina Hamnett and denizens of the clubs and pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, through the irrepressible Bacon and Lucian Freud, to David Hockney and Zandra Rhodes, who befriended Chopping when, in later life, he taught her at the Royal College of Art.
They settled during the war at the Storehouse in Wivenhoe, Essex, where their bohemian lifestyle was legendary (Bacon would travel the 75 miles from London by taxi).
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