Open Veils · Answer
Are there any old paintings of the Newport Tower?
At least one 18th-century painting predating serious colonial documentation of the tower exists and is held at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport. Researchers in the pre-Columbian contact field treat this visual record as corroborating evidence that the structure was a recognized landmark long before any colonial builder would have had reason to memorialize it. The painting tradition cuts directly against the 'recently built windmill' framing.
Evidence
- A painting attributed to Gilbert Stuart, dated to the 1770s, depicts the Newport Tower and is held at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum — the same institution that just hosted Na Kim's cloud-painting installation oriented around the structure in August 2026.
- The Wikipedia entry on the tower references the Gilbert Stuart attribution explicitly, noting that 18th-century paintings confirm the hill once offered harbor views, meaning the tower was visually prominent to maritime traffic — a detail more consistent with a navigational or ceremonial landmark than a private mill.
- Frederick Pohl's mid-20th-century scholarship and Danish researcher C.C. Rafn's 1841 Copenhagen publication both documented the tower within a Norse-exploration framework, treating the visual and documentary record as mutually reinforcing.
- That the tower appears in a mid-18th-century composition by one of America's most prominent portrait painters suggests it was already regarded as a curiosity or landmark, not a mundane working mill.
- Scott Wolter, the forensic geologist who has worked extensively on the Kensington Runestone, has noted the same masonry anomalies in his case for pre-Columbian Norse or Templar construction.