Donald Shaw MacLaughlan, born - Chicago, the Gateway - unknown - T-Shirt

This is an etched view of Chicago's built skyline, where towering Art Deco skyscrapers rise over a crowded street and a monument with figures anchors the scene.

Visual Elements & Composition

Parchment tone fills most of the image, with sepia black carrying the architecture and warm grey softening the distance. Tall vertical towers dominate, their stepped crowns climbing toward the top edge. A domed, colonnaded office building sits among them, and a sculptural monument with figures holds the street-level foreground. Parked vintage motor cars line the roadway, and obelisks stand at the left, framing the composition. The line work is dense and precise, with fine hatching that builds the shadows of stone and steel.

Meaning & Symbolism

The gateway motif reads Chicago as a threshold, the city that linked the American East to the expanding western frontier. The towers, the commercial and civic buildings, and the traffic below speak to movement, commerce, and industrial ambition during a period of rapid urban growth. Donald Shaw MacLaughlan, born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, was a leading architectural and topographical etcher of the early twentieth-century printmaking revival. Drawing on Rembrandt and James McNeill Whistler, he brought a refined sensitivity to line and atmosphere, and this print is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.

On the Unisex Heavy Cotton Tee

A tee carries its art across the chest and moves with the wearer, so the vertical towers rise along the body while the open parchment field gives the eye room to rest. Seen from a few feet away, the composition reads as a single skyline, and up close the etched hatching reveals the street, the figures, and the cars. The piece suits a wearer who appreciates the detail of a hand-worked print.