The young are remembered differently than the old. Adults who have died are recalled for their work, their heroic deeds or the families they created. The young? Mostly for lost dreams.
And so it is with “The Giant,” a 1923 oil painting created in memory of a young artist who’d intended to paint something like it himself. Instead, William Clothier Engle died of tuberculosis only a few years after graduating from the Westtown School in 1910. “Bill had always meant to execute a scene like this of children by the sea, looking up into the clouds,” William Ellis Coale, a former classmate, wrote in the 1940s. “But his early death precluded this, so that his old friend and master created this fitting memorial—and thus fulfilled the pupil’s dream.”
The friend in question is N.C. Wyeth, father of Andrew. Commissioned by Engle’s former classmates, Wyeth’s 5-by-6-foot painting has hung for over a century in the school’s dining room. According to an archivist, “not even a speck of food” has ever been found on the canvas, though generations of students have eaten their daily meals only a few feet away. Today, it’s protected only by a motion detector that squawks if anyone comes too close.
Engle grew up mostly in Newark, New Jersey, though he spent summers in Beach Haven working at his uncle’s hotel, the Engleside. His father, David, was a printer who also played flute in the Newark Symphony and was a sport fisherman who made his own rods. Engle’s mother, Margaret Clothier, was from a branch of the same family that produced Strawbridge & Clothier’s cofounder. After Engle finished elementary school, his Quaker parents chose to continue his education in the “guarded” environment of Westtown.
Coale described Engle as a tall, thin artist and philosopher. “Between classes, he was always out with brush and palette, painting about the countryside near the school,” he wrote.
At some point, Engle met Wyeth. Still mostly unknown then, Wyeth had moved from Massachusetts to Chadds Ford in 1902 to study with his mentor, illustrator Howard Pyle. “Several of my classmates can recall with me the privilege in our senior year of visiting Mr. Wyeth’s studio and of seeing him and Bill put on canvas the rich colors of the Brandywine Valley,” Coale wrote.
Engle had originally planned to attend Haverford College after graduating from Westtown, but his experience with Wyeth apparently led to a change of plans. In the fall of 1910, he began three years of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1913, he moved to Chadds Ford to work in Wyeth’s studio. The two men were close, and Wyeth’s letters show that Engle was more than a mere assistant. In June 1913, Wyeth wrote to his parents, “Sunday blew in cold as March, and exceedingly clear. We drove over for Engle, who was attending a reunion at Westtown. We spent a bully day in his company. He stayed overnight.”
The arrangement between the two didn’t last long, as Engle’s health had already begun to fail. In 1912, he’d spent the summer in Iowa, working on the family farm of a Westtown classmate in hopes of being restored by several months of outdoor life. But Engle’s “philosophical mind and artistic bent did not make him a natural at milking cows,” wrote Coale. When illness became invalidism, Engle went home to Newark. He died on his 25th birthday.
How the idea of a memorial painting to Engle originated isn’t mentioned in Westtown’s history or Wyeth biographies. In 1920, Westtown’s Class of 1910 met for its 10-year reunion. Perhaps one classmate shared the idea with another, and it took off. But a painting it was, and Wyeth agreed to take on the project for $500.
Wyeth’s specialty was magazine and book illustration. His first commission, in 1903, had been of a cowboy on a bucking bronco for the Saturday Evening Post. He went on to illustrate entire editions of classic stories like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, The Last of the Mohicans and Robinson Crusoe, among others. He approached the Westtown project in the same vein.
Wyeth’s first proposal was a series of pictures depicting scenes from Homer’s Odyssey that would hang in the Boys’ Collection Room. But the administration thought it would be too expensive to redecorate the woodwork in the large space.
“How the idea of a memorial painting to Engle originated isn’t mentioned in Westtown’s history or Wyeth biographies. Perhaps one classmate shared the idea with another, and it took off.”
In 1921, Wyeth had considered permanently relocating to Needham, Massachusetts, his hometown. His mother was ailing, and he was nostalgic for the place where he’d grown up. He even set up a studio behind his grandfather’s house. But that December, a destructive sleet storm pummeled the town. “N.C. stood on his studio steps, watching with grim irony as the boughs he had played under as a boy, and that he had planned for years to paint, broke into pieces before his eyes,” wrote N.C. Wyeth biographer David Michaelis.
At the time, the local paper said it was as if a giant had swung a scythe. That image was about all Wyeth salvaged from his brief return to Needham. A striding giant became the central motif in four holiday posters Wyeth created in 1922 for the U.S. Treasury, along with the Westtown commission.
Set in Engle’s old haunt of Beach Haven, Wyeth’s “The Giant” shows six children gazing up at a club-toting monster no adult could likely see. Five are Wyeth’s own, including blond Andrew standing nearest the sea. At left, a sixth child—a boy in a white cap—is presumed to represent Engle.
In a letter to his mother, Wyeth said the painting caused a “sensation” when he exhibited it. To the Wilmington Evening Journal, it represented how “the human mind, being itself the fanciful creation of a great Creator, becomes in turn a creator of fancy.”
Headmaster James Walker and his wife picked up the painting at Wyeth’s studio and carried it back to the school in an orchard truck.
Taken from the archives of Mark E. Dixon’s Retrospect column, a fixture in Main Line Today for 16 years.
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