N.C. Wyeth and The Giant

Bill Engle died before he could paint his masterpiece, so a friend did it for him.

The young are remembered differently than the old.  Adults who have died are recalled for their work, their heroic deeds or, if nothing else, for 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 had intended to paint something like it himself.  Instead, William Clothier Engle (1891-1916) died of tuberculosis only a few years after graduating from the Westtown School in 1910.  So, N.C. Wyeth painted it for him.

“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.”

Commissioned by Engle’s former classmates, Wyeth’s five-by-six-foot painting has hung for nearly 90 years 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 middle- and high-school-age students have eaten their daily meals only a few feet away.  Today, it is protected only by a motion detector that squawks if anyone comes too close.

William Engle grew up mostly in Newark, N.J., though he spent summers in Beach Haven, working at an uncle’s tourist hotel, the Engleside.  His father, David, was a printer who dabbled as a musician – he played flute in the Newark Symphony – and as a sport fisherman who made his own rods.  Engle’s mother, Margaret Clothier, was from a branch of the same family that had produced the co-founder of Strawbridge & Clothier.  The family was Quaker so, after William was through elementary school, his parents chose to continue his education in the “guarded” environment of Westtown.

Founded in 1799, Westtown was part of Philadelphia-area Quakers’ reaction to their loss of political, economic and social status during the Revolution.  Quakers had opposed the war for independence, and were still widely viewed as traitors.  That ostracism led them to withdraw from the wider world.  Quakers avoided politics and increasingly enforced rules against intermarriage.

To preserve and pass on their beliefs – and, in particular, to help Quaker children find appropriate spouses – the Friends turned to their schools.  New schools were founded and older schools became more exclusive.  Some that had previously accepted non-Quaker students began to turn them away.  Westtown provided room and board, which allowed faculty and administration to fully steep their charges in Quaker values and behavior.

Even “(Westtown’s) distant location,” according to a school history, “was an intentional effort by the Philadelphia Quakers to keep their children away from the influences of the city.”  The result was a strong familial atmosphere in which lifelong relationships were formed, and in which Engle made many friends.

Decades later, 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 and opened the eyes of many of us to the rare beauty surrounding us,” wrote Coale.  In the course of this, Engle met and began to work with Wyeth.  Then still mostly unknown, 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,” Coale later wrote, “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.”

Poems by Engle were frequent features of the school newspaper, including one, Playmates, that seems to suggest the image Wyeth later painted:

  “When I was just a little boy / I played beside the ocean / I saw it swell; I felt its spell / Its mystery of motion.

  “Upon the shore I hear it roar / It sobbing, sang and muttered / With joy or fear I used to hear / The strange wild words it uttered.

  “Then, too, its blue and frothing white / I thought hid caves of cool delight / But turbit, angry, swirling green / Hid monsters horrid, things unseen.

  “I’m older than that little boy / I know far more than he / About the name, the spread, the fame / Of that great sounding sea.

  “But oh, I know, its greatest joy / Its awe, and subtle potion / And not for me, but for the boy / The playmate of the ocean.”

Absent minded, Engle occasionally came to class wearing two neckties, or his bedroom slippers.  But his mind was first rate, and his senior essay on Coleridge was published in the school bulletin.

Engle had originally planned to attend Haverford after graduating from Westtown.  But his experience with Wyeth apparently led to a change of plans.  In the fall of 1910, Engle began three years of study at Philadelphia’s Academy of 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, he 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.”

And the mentoring seems to have gone both ways.  In late 1913, Wyeth was struggling over his career direction – whether to continue as primarily an illustrator of magazine stories, or to stretch for paintings that would stand on their own and establish him as a true artist.  It was the issue with which he struggled throughout his career.

“It is nearly easy,” Wyeth wrote to his brother, “to convince oneself that ‘sticking it out,’ as Papa says, would be the most courageous and helpful course to pursue.  But as Bill Engle adds, ‘It takes more courage to give up the proposition in your circumstances than to stick it out,’ and I agree with him.  I am an ardent believer in impulse.  Impulse is the heart and soul of real progress, and it behooves us to nourish that quality by giving it the encouragement of action.”

According to Coale, Wyeth told him shortly before his own death in 1945 that “he regarded Bill Engle as the most brilliant and original mind he had ever encountered.”

This arrangement didn’t last long because Engle’s health had already begun to fail.  In 1912, he had spent the summer in Iowa, working on the family farm of a Westtown classmate with the hope of being restored by several months of outdoor life.  But, wrote Coale, Engle’s “philosophical mind and artistic bent did not make him a natural at milking cows.”

In these final years, Engle – ever philosophical – wrote to Coale, quoting Dostoevsky: “As Father Zozzina told Ivan, ‘No one can prove to you the existence of God.  But through love of your fellow men you can come to believe it.’  Or words to that effect.”

When illness became invalidism, Engle went home to Newark.  He died on his 25^th birthday.

How the idea of a memorial to Engle originated, and that the memorial should be a painting, is not mentioned in Westtown’s history or in 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 had illustrated entire editions of classic stories such as 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, according to a 1972 school newsletter, was a series of pictures depicting scenes from Homer’s Odyssey that would hang in the Boy’s Collection Room.

“The administration, however, felt the cost of redecorating the wood work in that large room was too great,” wrote newsletter editor Cathy Larmore, “and hence, the present dining room south wall was chosen.”

In 1921, Wyeth had considered permanently relocating to Needham, Mass., his hometown.  His mother was ailing and he was nostalgic for the place he had grown up.  He even set up a studio behind his grandfather’s house.  But that December, “the worst sleet storm in local history,” as the Needham Chronicle called it, changed the face of the town.

“N.C. stood on his studio steps,” wrote Michaelis, “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.”

The paper said that it was as if a giant, striding over the town, had swung a scythe.  That image was about all that Wyeth salvaged from his brief return to Needham.  A striding giant became the central motif in four bank-holiday posters that Wyeth executed in 1922 for the U.S. Treasury, and in the Westtown commission.

Wyeth’s The Giant – painted at Beach Haven, Engle’s old haunt – shows six children gazing up at a club-toting giant that no adult could likely see.  Five of the children are Wyeth’s own, including blonde 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."