Richard Chopping
John Stephenson, Richard Chopping, Wendy Knott, Francis Bacon and Ianthe Knott in Wivenhoe (detail), May 1985 © Courtesy The Estate of Francis Bacon and the Knott family
Richard (‘Dickie’) Chopping was a writer, illustrator and former teacher at the Royal College of Art. He was Denis Wirth Miller’s partner and the pair lived in Wivenhoe, in Essex, where Bacon also purchased a terraced house around 1975. Bacon preferred city life and most of his sojourns in the countryside were brief. Like Wirth Miller, Chopping was close friends with Bacon and is the subject of one of his portraits, Two Studies for Portrait of Richard Chopping, 1978. Their friendship with Bacon is relatively undocumented as both Wirth Miller and Chopping preferred to maintain their privacy.
