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Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts, and a second Yale official paid a weekend visit to the city last month at the invitation of historian and Yale graduate Richard Rosenfeld, who said he hatched the idea to interest Yale in Gloucester.

One potential site is the old Paint Factory, with two acres and six buildings on Rocky Neck, where copper paint was first formulated to improve the seaworthiness of the last of the great wooden-hulled ships.

Through a spokesman, Shailor declined to discuss her visit, which included a meeting with Mayor John Bell and the mayor's father Harold, who is a Yale graduate and the retired president of the Cape Ann Historical Association. While here, Shailor also met with members of the Rocky Neck art community and visited galleries.

Others who met with Shailor included Bernard Chaet, a Rockport resident and professor emeritus of the Yale School of Art. Chaet said he met with the Yale delegation in the mayor's office.

"They asked me a lot of questions at the mayor's luncheon," said Chaet. "People (at Yale) would love the idea" of coming to Gloucester for the summer.

"It's a wonderful place for painters," he said. "It would be wonderful if Yale wanted to do something."

Chaet cautioned that Yale's interest was preliminary. "If they're interested," he said, "I'll be their consultant."

Chaet noted that for more than a decade, Yale has been rewarding a student a year with a $5,000 stipend to spend two weeks in Gloucester to paint.

Chaet, 82, a distinguished painter whose work is in numerous museums, said that in 1967 he took a leave as director of the Yale Summer School to paint on Cape Ann and never went back to New Haven.

Rosenfeld revealed the effort to interest Yale in Gloucester last week at a meeting of the Historical Commission, called to discuss a developer's stalled effort to convert the abandoned Paint Factory into a waterfront mansion.

An icon of the city's marine past, the Paint Factory may be the most obvious, but not the only site for a satellite campus of the Ivy League university based in New Haven, Conn.

Rosenfeld's estate on Rocky Neck overlooks the Paint Factory.

A benefactor of Yale, as evidenced by a residential hall bearing his name, Rosenfeld has been active in the more than year-long negotiations between the Historical Commission and the factory's owner and would-be developer, Vahid Nickpour.

Nickpour has agreed to grant the commission's request for a facade easement insuring that the exterior of the 19th century industrial complex remains permanently unchanged in a form approved by the city after it becomes a private home.

But negotiations have bogged down. The commission has demanded detailed elevations of the intended final appearance of the factory; Nickpour so far has declined to provide these.

A number of previous efforts to redevelop the property stalled over the often contradictory requirements of federal, state and local permitting authorities, and passionate local determination that it remain an authentic relic.

Nickpour and the city are concerned that neglect and age are taking a rapid toll on the Paint Factory, which hasn't been used since the 1980s.

On Aug. 2, Nickpour acceded to a request from the Historical Commission that he secure and "button up" the property within a month. The work has not commenced, but Rosenfeld told the commission last week that Nickpour had called him from the Paint Factory to reassure him the work would be done.

Should Nickpour's effort to convert the factory into a home remain frustrated or falter - he has appealed to the Historical Commission to help him win the multiple sign-offs still required - the option of redeveloping the singular property could be transferred, as it has before.

Then-owner Paul Quinn sold an option in the 1990s to would-be condo developers, who were unable to acquire local permits. Earlier this decade, builder Anthony Giacalone was thwarted in his hope to convert it into a mansion. When Nickpour acquired the property, he took over Giacalone's local permits and began intense negotiations with the Historical Commission.

Nickpour could not be reached yesterday.

The Historical Commission's Thomas O'Keefe asked Rosenfeld, sitting in the audience last Wednesday night, about the rumors of Yale's interest. He answered that "an associate provost" and another Yale official were "in discussions about establishing a facility on Rocky Neck."

Rosenfeld said, "My impression is they were impressed with Gloucester and its history."

He said the rough model for what Yale might create here is a much smaller version of Yale's Summer School of Music in Norfolk, Conn. Located on an estate willed to the university, the School of Music has become a summer campus and performance center.

"Yale has no facility for graduate students of art," said Rosenfeld.

He suggested that students would be inspired to work where Fitz Henry Lane, Edward Hopper and many other important painters worked in the 19th and 20th centuries, helping create the summer art colony on Rocky Neck.

The residents of a Yale studio here, he said, could work where the masters worked and "compare their work to the masters."

Mayor Bell said he hosted a group from Yale in his office "to explain the opportunities in Gloucester."

The matchmaking began just as the Yale School of Art was preparing for a new dean: artist and curator Robert Storr, whose father, Richard Storr, has a home in Annisquam.

Richard Storr said the events were coincidental. Reached in Toronto, he said he did not hear about Yale's interest in Gloucester from his son but instead in casual conversation with a friend in Annisquam.

O'Keefe said he questioned Rosenfeld because "a lot of whispering is being done. Let it out there."