"Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds" by Martin Johnson Heade. (National Gallery of Art)

The artist stands in the distance, gazing up at the striated chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent, England. His family is gathering shells in the shallow tidal pools of Pegwell Bay that, with the receding waters, have a look of barren desolation. The sky is an unearthly yellow from the late light of an autumn sun. Above, Donati's Comet leaves a trail that will not be seen again for nearly two millenniums.

This painting, by William Dyce, "Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th, 1858," and executed soon after that date, is not the kind of work you might expect to see in an exhibition titled "Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts." And Dyce, who is described as a "deeply devout High Church Anglican," would hardly have been enamored of the challenge to the clerical interpretation of the Creation that Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was to make in 1859, just as this canvas was being painted.

But it is a measure of the achievement of this remarkable exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art here, that this work is seen differently, as we look at it through Darwinian eyes - as is nearly everything in the show. The cliffs and comet and shells allude to the lumbering processes of the ancient earth against which daily experience - the ebb of tides, the attentions of a distracted child in the painting's foreground, the recollections of the artist himself - plays itself out. The image has an eerie beauty, but it also reflects a gnawing anxiety about the mismatch between the ageless and the temporal, the divine and the mortal, an anxiety not unlike the kind Darwin's theories can still inspire.

As you walk through this exhibition, mounted in honor of the Darwin bicentennial (and the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species"), you may not learn anything new about his theories, but you will come to see differently, or at least begin to understand that our ways of seeing have evolved because of the power of his vision.

The show claims to be exploring, for the first time, the impact of Darwin's theories on the visual arts. With a few deft selections and explanations, French Impressionism is shown to have been under the influence. (Degas was fascinated by Darwin's study comparing facial expressions of animals and humans.) So, too, were the aesthetic movements of the late 19th century, with their visions of feminine beauty. (Sexual selection was one of the themes Darwin turned to in exploring the power of plumage.)

Also in the show are anthropological photographs of "primitive" cultures that Darwin collected (used by some commentators to affirm a racial form of "social Darwinism," but also to examine differing notions of beauty), and, of course, images of nature "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it, with animals enacting the battle for survival out of which evolved creatures exquisitely fitted to their habitats. There is one rarely displayed taxidermic specimen from 1851 by John Hancock: a heron that has caught an eel, and is, in turn, bloodied by a falcon.

In some of its examples the show is guilty of exaggeration: Not everything here demonstrates a direct influence of Darwinian theory.

Some objects reveal ideas at large in the culture, from which Darwin himself had drawn. But this exhibition's ambitions are greater than just tracing influence. It constructs an intricate narrative of mutual influence between science and the visual arts, gathering objects from Darwin's own library, various British and American museums, and private collections.

The show's current incarnation at the Yale Center was overseen by the curator Elisabeth Fairman, and it displays fossils, minerals and taxidermy from the Peabody Museum at Yale. But the exhibition is primarily a creation of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, whose art collection Darwin savored as a student and recalled with affection as he gathered specimens on the long journey of the HMS Beagle. It is to the Fitzwilliam that the exhibition will travel in June.

And like its illuminating catalogue, edited by the show's curators, Diana Donald, an art historian, and Jane Munro, from the Fitzwilliam, "Endless Forms" is a major achievement.

The show's impact comes from its shift in the focus of attention to the visual. It demonstrates just how important it was for Darwin to learn to see. Some of his earliest inspirations were images of exploration that he came upon as a child and student, which are on display here. They include a book's simple wood engravings of the snow-capped Andes Mountains that he said "first gave me a wish to travel in remote countries," and an image of the Brazilian rain forest from 1828, which he later discovered was "exactly true" but which "underrates" the sublimity of the place.

The lust for exploration was accompanied by an almost fanatical attention to visual detail. There is an extraordinary poster-size image of the head of a flea created by Lens Aldous and used in an 1838 presentation at the Entomological Society of London, of which Darwin was vice president: a meticulous rendering of a magnified image.

Darwin was not a gifted artist and could not have done anything comparable, but he might have compensated for that deficiency with obsessional precision. Minute differences between samples had to be carefully noted.

The influence of these observations on the larger culture, though, was not in the small details but in the broadest canvas of ideas: the notion of geological rather than biblical time, the idea of transforming species rather than unchanging categories of creation, the ways in which finely wrought contrivances developed out of accident. Those are the themes of the show's objects.