Well I was able to get the background to show using the stylesheet of the window. This put the graphic as a background for the window. It took some doing as there seems to be some bug in Qt 4 where you have to have a repaint event (even an empty one) for it to show. I discovered that this is not what I wanted anyway. This method displays the graphic with original dimensions and uses the window view area to crop if smaller or fill if larger. This action is like a MS Windows wallpaper image. Not what I had in mind.

I later ran across QScrollArea as a container for a control like a label. So I changed my project to have a QScrollArea that contains a label that has my graphic as a pixmap. The label widget is set to scale as the QScrollArea contents. Now each time the window resizes, so does the scroll area and the graphic in the label.

Hope this helps those who have run across this problem.