The coastal community of Gloucester, Massachusetts, has dozens of homes on the market but only one of them has served as a muse for a famous artist.
New York artist Edward Hopper visited Gloucester in 1923 and saw the home at 2 Clarendon St., painting a watercolor he would title "The Mansard Roof." The home, captured in a painterly style, appears to be blue and white.
The Brooklyn Museum eventually bought the piece, part of a series of watercolors Hopper produced that year that the local Rocky Neck Art Colony says helped catapult his career.
The painting may be in a museum collection, but the home itself, now painted pink, is on the market — with an asking price of $2.2 million.
"Whoever buys this house, they won't choose it because Ed Hopper had a painting of it," said Ruth Pino, the home's listing agent with ReMax. "It'll be because they want to be the same proud owners of it that it had in the past."
The property features three bedrooms and three bathrooms across 2,800 square feet. Built in 1876, the home has two fireplaces, an attic, a cupola and hardwood floors in the living room. Most homes in Gloucester were built generations ago as summer vacation properties, but from its onset, 2 Clarendon was constructed as a year-round residence, Pino said.
"Its condition is remarkable considering that it's 150 years old," Pino told Homes.com. "All the generations of people who lived there took care of it and made sure it didn't go to ruin. I've seen a lot of older homes at some point in its time become run-down, and this house, I don't think, was ever run-down."
Gloucester, which has the nation's oldest seaport, is a city known for its maritime history and being a major player in the fishing industry. Film director Wolfgang Petersen shot his 2000 movie "The Perfect Storm" in Gloucester. The city, 36 miles north of Boston, is home to one of the nation's oldest art colonies, the Rocky Neck Art Colony, and Gorton's Seafood.
The home's current owners are Tory and Greta Bagshaw. Tory has lived in the home since he was 2, when his parents bought the house for $25,000 in 1962, Greta Bagshaw told Homes.com.
Tory's favorite part of the house is the cupola, but Greta's favorite is the living room at the back of the first floor. The room has a row of windows that look out to Gloucester Harbor.
Greta Bagshaw said one of her fondest memories is watching the Gloucester Schooner Festival from those windows. "The light there is amazing, especially the sunset views," she said. "You see the whale-watching boats and the schooners, people rowing sand boats, people in kayaks. It's just a great perch."
Greta Bagshaw, who is Swedish, said she will miss living in the house, in part because she and her husband had a tradition of hosting a smorgasbord for the family on Christmas Eve.
"There would be 20 to 40 people downstairs — people singing songs and drinking shots," she said. "We had ham, Swedish meatballs, smoked salmon (and) herring."
The Bagshaws have moved out and now live in a different part of Gloucester, Greta said. Pino has been showing the home to potential buyers in recent weeks. Buyers who stop by typically start their tour doing the same thing — and it's not to match what they see in Hopper's painting, Pino said.
"People go right to the back of the house to look out the window because there's an adventure schooner going by or a lobster boat," she said. "It's just mesmerizing to look out that window."
