Why is Motif Number 1 the most painted building in America?

The short answer

Motif Number 1 is a small red fishing shack on Bradley Wharf in the harbor of Rockport, on Cape Ann, north of Boston. It is known to students of art and art history as the most often-painted building in America. It earned that name because it was the favorite subject of the painters who made Rockport an artists' colony from the late nineteenth century onward: its setting on the wharf, the light on the harbor and its simple shape made it an ideal composition, and it came to stand for New England's maritime life.

The shack you see today is not the original. The first was built in 1884 and destroyed in the Blizzard of 1978; an exact replica was built the same year, and the town keeps it looking as the painters knew it.

A fishing town full of painters

Rockport was a town of fishermen and granite quarries before it was a town of painters. The first settler, a granite cutter named Richard Tarr, lived on the headland in 1680, and by the 1830s Rockport granite was being shipped to towns along the whole east coast. Cape Ann's quarries cut paving blocks for streets across the United States, and a distinctive sloop was developed to carry the stone.

Painters came for the light and the shore. Cape Ann became a thriving center for artists in the nineteenth century. Fitz Henry Lane, who began as a lithographer in Gloucester, developed the style of marine painting known as luminism, and the Rocky Neck Art Colony grew up in Gloucester harbor. Rockport drew American Impressionists as a summer vacation place known for its boulder-strewn beaches and its fishing harbor, and it thrived as an artists' colony even when the granite trade declined in the Depression.

The quarry town

The granite shaped Rockport as much as the sea did. The Rockport Granite Company opened in 1865 and lasted until 1933, and its quarries drew workers from across Europe; Finns brought to Pigeon Cove in the early 1890s to break strikes became some of the most determined fighters for workers' rights. When concrete replaced stone in the Depression, the granite trade declined and the quarries fell quiet.

The town's character stayed unusual in other ways too. Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous helped make the town known, and except for a period in the 1930s Rockport was a dry town until 2005, when restaurants were first allowed to serve alcohol.

How the shack got its name

The shack was built in 1884, just as Rockport was becoming both a fishing settlement and a colony of artists. It sat at the end of the wharf with the harbor on either side, its red walls against the water and the sky, and the painters kept coming back to it. The painter Lester Hornby is believed to have been the first to call it Motif Number 1, meaning simply the favorite subject of the town's painters, and the name stuck.

It appears in the work of Aldro Hibbard and of the impressionist Harry Aiken Vincent, who arrived in Rockport around 1916 and helped form the Rockport Art Association. It has been the subject of hundreds of paintings and photographs, and aspiring artists and visitors still come from all over the world to paint it.

A studio, a monument and a parade float

In the 1930s the painter John Buckley used the shack as his studio. He sold it to the town in 1945, which bought it to dedicate it as a monument to the Rockporters who had served in the armed forces, and it has belonged to the town ever since.

The shack's fame was already national by then. In 1933 the town's American Legion post built a 27-foot scale model of Motif Number 1, designed by Aldro Hibbard and Anthony Thieme, as a float for the Legion's parade in Chicago during the World's Fair. Driven there by daylight only, it won first place among two hundred floats, and more than four thousand people turned out to welcome it home.

The Blizzard of 1978

In 1978 the great blizzard that struck the coast destroyed the original shack. The town rebuilt it the same year as an exact replica, so the building on the wharf today dates from 1978, though it looks as the original did.

Rockport has taken pains to preserve its appearance ever since. It found a red paint that looks weather-beaten even when new, and it keeps the area around the shack clear of overhead wires, traffic signs and advertising, so the view a painter sets up to is the view the painters of the 1920s saw.

Seeing it

Bradley Wharf is in Rockport's harbor, in the center of the town. Beside the harbor runs Bearskin Neck, a short street of old fishermen's and lobstermen's shacks that are now restaurants, shops and galleries. The shack can be seen from the wharf itself and from across the inner harbor, which is the view most painters chose. Come early in the morning or late in the day for the light that drew them, and out of summer for fewer crowds.

Rockport is at the end of the Newburyport/Rockport commuter rail line from North Station in Boston, and by road it lies on Route 127, the loop round Cape Ann; see Scenic Drives.

The rest of Cape Ann

Make a day of the whole cape. In Gloucester, still a working fishing port, see the Fisherman's Memorial on the harbor and the Cape Ann Museum, which holds the premier collection of Fitz Henry Lane, forty of his paintings and a hundred of his drawings. The Rocky Neck Art Colony on Smith Cove, across the harbor, is called the oldest art colony in the country. North of Rockport, Halibut Point State Park looks over the old quarries to the open sea, and offshore stand the twin lighthouses of Thacher Island.

Today Rockport is a residential and tourist town, still home to a number of lobster fishermen and artists, and many galleries on and around Bearskin Neck sell the work of painters who set up on the same wharf. For more on the wider journey, see the itineraries, and for a base on the North Shore, Salem.