This poem appears in the forthcoming issue of Ambit, January 2015.

It is based on a tiny self-portrait by Leon Cogniet, newly arrived at the Villa Medici in Rome on a scholarship, reading the first letter from home. The painting is in Cleveland Museum of Art and can be found if you google.  Cogniet later became director of the Ecole de Beaux Arts, the most prestigious French art school, and encouraged his sister Marie Amelie to head a teaching studio where women might also train as figurative artists, learning to draw from the life model as men were allowed to do.