Biritsh illustrator and author Richard (Wasey) Chopping died 17 April 2008. Born in Colchester, Essexm on 14 April 1917, he may be best known for illustrating several James Bond book covers. He did the Jonathan Cape editions of Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957), Goldfinger (1959), and For Your Eyes Only (1960).
By the time he was working on those books, he was already an illustrator of some repute—known for depictions of plants and animals—as well as a teacher and author. He had started painting as a child, and attended the London Theatre Studio to learn stage design in the late 1930s. He then moved on to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, where he was a student, cook, and housekeeper.
In the 1940s, Chopping worked on Penguin Books’ planned 22-volume series on flora of the British Isles: he drew every flower with Frances Partridge supplying the text. Unfortunately, the collection was a financial failure, and after seven years, they had only reached C when it was canceled.
He taught at the Colchester School of Art in the 1950s, and in 1961 moved to the Royal College of Art, where he wound up also teaching creative writing until his retirement at age 65.
Chopping’s first novel, The Fly (1965), was “a perfectly disgusting concoction,” according to senior editor David Farrer at Secker & Warburg. Farrer passed it along to Giles Gordon as his first editing job, and though Gordon agreed with the assessment, he also thought the book was “sufficiently sordid to appeal to voyeurs, and if Chopping were to adorn it with one of his famous dust-jackets it could be a succès de scandale; and so it proved.” Chopping’s second novel, The Ring (1967), attracted no attention.
Chopping lived with artist Denis Wirth-Miller from the late 1930s. They bought a house together in 1944, and were the first in Colchester to register a civil partnership, in December 2005.
The Independent has a much longer obituary at this link.