One wonders if it is age that imparts this quality to the images, or if Rodenbach's contemporaries felt it too.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner

But the portrait also captures that identification with Bruges that is a dominant theme in so much of Rodenbach's work.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner

Rodenbach's brief novel centers on Hugues Viane, a middle-age widower who, distraught at his wife's death several years before, moves to Bruges.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner

In this image, Rodenbach rises up against the twilit background of the Flemish city of Bruges, whose medieval houses and towers stand above its immemorial canals.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner

The painting was completed in 1895, three years before Rodenbach's death and three years after the publication of "Bruges-La-Morte, " the novel for which he is remembered today, if he is remembered at all.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner

But no one who has been to Bruges will fail to appreciate what may be its foremost achievement: the insight with which Rodenbach has seized upon and expressed the elusive essence of an entire city, as though it had a human heart.

WSJ: Georges Rodenbach | Bruges-La-Morte | Incarnating the World Within | Masterpiece by James Gardner