Book of the week The Visitors’ Book

Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller were a couple of “sociable gay painters” who “flitted through” British artistic life for more than 50 years, said Andrew Lycett in The Spectator. Though they “knew everyone”, their most enduring friendship was with Francis Bacon: The Visitors’ Book, a joint biography of the pair, is subtitled “In Francis Bacon’s Shadow”. Chopping, an illustrator, was best known for painting the trompe l’oeil dust jackets for Ian Fleming’s Bond novels; Wirth-miller, the more ambitious artist, regularly shared a studio with Bacon. But it was the couple’s bohemian lifestyle that made them “legendary”. For several decades, their quayside cottage in Wivenhoe, Essex, functioned as a kind of outpost of London’s art scene; Bacon used to travel there by taxi after drunken nights in Soho; other regulars included Terence Conran (who designed their kitchen), David Hockney and Zandra Rhodes. Though Jon Lys Turner, a long-standing friend, is “perhaps too close for total objectivity”, his book nonetheless “zips along” and provides an “excellent social history of gay life in the 20th century”.

“Rarely can there have been a more obnoxious and grotesque crew” than the cast of this “immensely entertaining” book, said Roger Lewis in The Times. Lucian Freud, another friend, was rude “for the sheer love of the thing”; Bacon “believed cruelty was a form of moral honesty”. Chopping and Wirth-miller themselves were a pair of “sadomasochistic queens” whose relationship was marked by incessant “squabbling”. Their main “bone of contention” was sexual jealousy – which was inevitable, given their staggering promiscuity. (Chopping once attempted to list his sexual conquests, but had to give up after filling seven A4 pages.) After Bacon’s death, in 1992, the couple “slipped into obscurity”, and their final years were blighted by drunkenness and dementia. In 2005, however, they did become one of the first couples to form a civil partnership.

“The end was terrible,” said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times. One night in 2008, Chopping slipped in the kitchen, cracking his head. When Wirth-miller, who was “losing his marbles”, came down the next morning, he stepped over Chopping, ignoring his cries for help. “He deserved it because he was irritating,” he later explained. Chopping, eventually rescued by a neighbour, died ten days later. Wirth-miller lived on another two years. Lys Turner’s “haunting biography”, full of “delicious anecdotes”, is a worthy memorial to this troubled pair.