Rockport, MA Shirts

At the end of a granite wharf in Rockport stands a small red fishing shack that artists long ago nicknamed Motif No. 1, a joke about how every painting student in town seemed to set up an easel in front of the same subject. The joke stuck so thoroughly that the shack is now often called the most painted building in America. The original went up in 1884 and was swept into the harbor by the blizzard of 1978, and the town rebuilt it that same year, plank for plank, because Rockport without it was unthinkable. The rest of town keeps faith with the image: lobster boats working the ledges off Cape Ann, buoys drying in stacks, galleries tucked into old fish houses. Our Rockport design puts the red shack front and center, hung with the painted lobster buoys that decorate its seaward wall, the harbor lying flat and bright behind it. It is the view a thousand easels have faced, carried on cotton instead of canvas. As local Rockport businesses join ShirtMap, they will appear right here on this page.