Today marks a very special day, for on this day in 1957 Ian Fleming met a young illustrator that was to prove pivotal in the lives of both men and the future of the James Bond novels. That illustrator was Richard Wasey Chopping. We spoke to one of Chopping’s trustees – Jon Lys Turner –…
When artists Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller died in their nineties, their friend Jon Lys Turner inherited an extensive personal archive. When he began to look through it, he discovered letters and other material that revealed Chopping and Wirth-Miller to be a previously missing link in the twentieth-century art world and pivotal figures in the…
by MW Bewick It is only a matter of time. Sooner or later, if you get talking to the locals in Wivenhoe, Essex, someone will namedrop Richard Chopping: “Oh, Dicky and Denis,” they will say. “You don’t know about Dicky and Denis? If you’d been here when they were here… Wivenhoe was much more, well,…
Francis Bacon provides an interesting footnote into how Richard Chopping ended up creating the James Bond dust jackets for Ian Fleming; it was at one of Bacon’s art exhibitions that Ann Fleming, a close friend of Bacon, made the introduction. Chopping recalled: “He [Bacon] took her [Ann Fleming] upstairs to see mine, which was very good of him,…
Richard Chopping’s association with Bond author Ian Fleming began when he was exhibiting some Trompe L’Oeil works at a London gallery when his friend Francis Bacon showed Fleming’s wife around. The ensuing cover of From Russia with Love (1957) was similarly in Trompe L’Oeil style, the imagery of rose and dew drop being specified by…
Artistic Licence Renewed 