Promotional photo

Mrs. Delany’s collection reflects an 18th-century world rife with assurance and contentment as well as loss.

Mrs. Delany and her Circle
Ends Jan. 3. Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St.; 203-432-2800, yale.edu/ycba.

Like debris from the assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a curtain of blossoms stretches up one side of the courtyard.

At the entrance to the exhibition, there is another display resembling a slaughter of flowers, each stuck like a bird in a trapper's net.

These are the preludes, delightful and ominous, for what is evoked by this gathering of Mrs. Delany and her Circle at the Yale Center for British Art.

Delany's first marriage was arranged at 17 to a man four decades her senior. "[I] wished from my soul I had been led, as Iphigenia was, to be sacrificed."

She's one you have questions for.

But this exhibition leaves you feeling like Dylan Thomas presented with Christmas gifts of "books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

For this, the subject is largely to blame.

Delany's was an art of privacy. To know her works is not the same as knowing her. For instance, her needlework, where details are lost at a distance in what is an almost invisible delicacy. It feels almost indecorous to subject her to too much inspection. Despite gorgeously embroidered garments, in which an opium poppy is balanced against a thistle, we are aware of science that turns to ornament, not of secrets that turn a light on the stitcher's soul.

Eighteenth century England was rife with newly invented catalogues of naming and classifications that claimed to decode the natural world. It was a time when the English perfected gardening. At the very moment these biological mysteries were being domesticated, Mrs. Delany, widowed a second time after a marriage more companionable to both her wit and her curiosity, began the project of creating her museum of paper flowers.

There are one thousand of these fastidiously fashioned recreations, with all the low relief dimensions of blossoms pressed and crushed. Seeing the portrait of her in widow's garb, one can only wonder if grief was not the background for every bright collage.

Yet you imagine her pleasure, too, in the exhaustive uniqueness of the work, with its carefully corrected labels. There is assurance and contentment in the making, a life at ease with the unexpected way in which it found meaning.

As a memorial coda to the exhibition, the British installation artist Jane Wildgoose has fashioned a "Promiscuous Assemblage" that is meant to evoke a vast miscellany of natural history that Delany would have known well.

The original was dispersed after the death of its owner, the Duchess of Portland, as instructed in her will. It was as if she knew the fragility of the world she had collected during the last surviving moment of an illusion that you could keep all of creation in a single room.

Here are the corals that were thought to be a dream of art where nature and culture blurred. Here is the veiled mirror, the mortuary of butterflies, and the selling of the seashells, an astounding fantasy of the past that prefigures those ecological catastrophes of our own time.

And those to come.

So there might have been one last cabinet, empty save for a single, stuffed seabird blackfaced with fuel oil from a North Sea spill.