Richard Chopping was the creator of some of the most celebrated dustjackets in modern fiction, those of the first editions of the James Bond novels.

Beginning with From Russia with Love in 1957, he painted the covers for nine of them over the next decade, helping to turn the spy into a global phenomenon. Despite his part in that success, however, Chopping disapproved of Ian Fleming’s blend of snobbery and violence. “I don’t mind a bit of sex,” he reflected recently, “but there is enough violence in the world without needing to make it more glamorous.”

His association with the author came about when he was exhibiting some of his trompe l’oeil works at a London gallery that was also showing his friend Francis Bacon. When Ann Fleming, the writer’s wife, was being taken around by Bacon he pointed out Chopping’s paintings to her and she — having rather better taste than her husband — suggested to Fleming that he use Chopping for the next Bond book, the fifth in the series.

Fleming specified the imagery that must appear on the cover — a rose with a drop of dew on it — and lent Chopping a Smith & Wesson revolver to study. This was borrowed from the armourer Geoffrey Boothroyd (one of the sources for Q) and briefly caused complications when a similar gun was used in a triple murder in Glasgow. Yet though the cover of From Russia with Love stated that it had been designed by Fleming, Chopping was always adamant that aside from the content the work was his.

Certainly, Fleming appeared enthusiastic about the distinctive threedimensional look of the jacket and, after the wife of one of his publishers had had a go at Dr. No, the two men renewed their collaboration for Goldfinger (1959). Its depiction of a skull with a rose between its teeth repeated the iconography of beauty and death that became the hallmark of the covers, and was Chopping’s own favourite among them. It was also the first of the books that he had read, however, and his adverse reaction perhaps coloured his later attitude to Fleming.

Each of the cover paintings, executed in watercolour, took him a month to complete, but though very well paid for them by the standard of the day he came increasingly to resent Fleming’s refusal to give him a royalty on each copy sold. He also regretted allowing Fleming to keep the original work, and was irritated at not being involved in designing the posters for the films.

Towards the end of his life he repudiated his association with Bond. “Quite honestly, I’m sick of it,” he said in 2003, describing Fleming as “mean and vain” when he auctioned off what remained of his memorabilia. “I have been swindled all the way along the line,” he claimed, and indeed he repented of having some years earlier parted with his signed copies of the books for £1,200. Much prized by collectors, three of these were sold shortly afterwards for 35 times that sum.

Yet though he would have preferred to have been remembered for other work, that for Bond endures. Earlier this year several of Chopping’s covers appeared on the stamps issued to commemorate Fleming’s centenary, and they also feature in an exhibition on Bond at the Imperial War Museum.

Richard Wasey Chopping was born in Colchester in 1917. He came from a family of millers that made, he recalled, “the whitest flour in Essex”. His father became Mayor of Colchester, but Richard’s twin brother died in infancy and the other was to perish during the Second World War.

He was educated at Gresham’s, Holt, where Benjamin Britten and the future spy Donald Maclean were contemporaries. His artistic education came afterwards, at Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, where Lucian Freud was also studying. Chopping was more factotum than pupil but learnt by observing Morris work, although he claimed never to have grasped perspective.

Like Morris, he had a passion for nature, and his first commission was for Butterflies of Britain (1943). The job came through Morris’s friend Kathleen Hale, once Augustus John’s secretary but better known as the creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat. She introduced Chopping to Noel Carrington, brother of the artist Dora Carrington and an editor at Puffin.

Chopping’s connection to Bloomsbury and Penguin continued with his next project, a mammoth 22-volume encyclopaedia of British Wild Flowers with which he was entrusted by the firm’s founder, Allen Lane. The text was to be written by Frances Partridge, but after the pair had laboured for seven years the work was abruptly cancelled in 1949, just before publication, as being too expensive.

While recovering from this disappointment Chopping taught plant drawing at Colchester School of Art. From 1961 he worked for more than 20 years at the Royal College of Art, teaching ceramics and textiles to students who included Zandra Rhodes.

Meanwhile, he continued to illustrate covers, such as for the 15th edition of the cultural miscellany The Saturday Book (1955). The features of the boy in the boater on the jacket of The Fourth of June (1962), David Benedictus’s novel about Eton, were Chopping’s own. Many of his paintings also bore his visual stamp, a bluebottle fly.

Yet more and more he came to think of himself as an author rather than as an artist. He had written several children’s books in the Forties, and in the Sixties, as well as teaching creative writing at the RCA, he published two novels, The Fly (1965) and The Ring (1967). Both were well observed but so grim and squalid in content that they failed to establish him as a writer.

Chopping had a solo exhibition at the New Art Centre, London, in 1977 and a retrospective at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1979. His last dustjacket was for John Gardner’s Bond novel Licence Renewed (1981). His sight, and health, had deteriorated markedly in recent years.

Dicky Chopping could have a sharp sense of humour, but was esteemed by his friends as a considerate, caring and honourable man. He had lived since 1944 in the artists’ community at Wivenhoe, Essex. In 2005 he entered into a civil partnership with Denis Wirth-Miller, a fellow artist with whom he had lived for some 70 years, with whom he had collaborated on several books and who survives him.

Richard Chopping, artist, writer and teacher, was born on April 14, 1917. He died on April 17, 2008, aged 91