photo #5796313

This painting was commissioned as a memorial by the classmates of William Engle, a pupil at Westtown School, Pennsylvania, US who died of tuberculosis in 1916 on his 25th birthday. Its painter, N. C. Wyeth, was a personal friend and mentor to Engle, who’d studied landscape painting under him after leaving school. Titled The Giant, the 1923 painting depicts children at Beach Haven, New Jersey, where Engle spent his summers, looking out to a looming figure in the clouds over the Atlantic. It was a scene that, according to one of his classmates, the budding young Engle had planned to paint himself. ‘Bill had always meant to execute a scene like this of children by the sea, looking up into the clouds,’ wrote classmate William Ellis Coale in 1946. ’But his early death precluded this, so that his old friend and master created this fitting memorial.’N. C. Wyeth formed the giant from a towering Cumulus congestus cloud and accompanied it with dark streaks known as velum that are often found at the flanks of such huge convection clouds. The painting, which still hangs in the dining hall of Westtown School, shows N. C. Wyeth’s own five children alongside a child-aged William Engle in the white hat.The Giant (1923) by N. C. Wyeth was suggested to us by Peg Guilfoyle (Member 40,637).