Edgar Allan Poe, in a watercolor portrait by A.C. Smith

Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, and nowadays when you think of Poe you no doubt summon up one of the few image of him to have survived — a daguerreotype taken near the end of his life where he looks, well, somber, or as at least one Poe scholar puts it, “dissipated.” “However, scholars say Poe looked far more vigorous, perhaps even dashing, in his earlier years,” and the recent uncovering of a long-lost portrait proves it, reports Ben Nuckols in an Associated Press wire story.

The portrait — which will go on display today for the first time at a church adjacent to Poe’s grave in Baltimore — is a watercolor that shows a “more robust” Poe at his writing desk, with event “the slightest hint of a smile on his face,” says Nuckols. It was done by artist A.C. Smith, probably five or six years before Poe’s death, and “actually represents Poe as he appeared to his contemporaries — a handsome, sophisticated young man on the rise,” says its owner, Cliff Krainik, who found the painting in “a collector’s vast estate in Charlottesville, Va.” and “paid only a few dollars for it.” He plans to sell it at auction soon and expects to make tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on it. (It’s one of only three known portraits of Poe, one of which has been lost, plus a first edition of Poe’s first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, sold last month for $662,500.)

As for what Poe thought of it, though — as he says in a letter to a friend, “It scarcely resembles me at all.”