The new Charles Darwin exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art is Entitled “Endless forms”: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. It includes everything from pigeon skulls, to Cézanne paintings, to a seven-minute looped video of pheasants mating. The visiting curator from London, with her lovely nest of salt-and-pepper hair, kicky tweed dress and leather boots, told the touring students, in her most deadpan British manner, with regard to the pheasant footage: “If you’re waiting for the climax, there isn’t one. It’s seven minutes of very elaborate courtship.”

A rotund fellow interrupted our tour to add his insight on scientific theories of artistic vision. He was wearing an odd combination of pinstripe suit, leather suspenders, linen shirt, and backpack, and his intervention was delightfully disruptive.

My friend and I had the odd fortune of encountered this interloper the very next day, at the New Haven hot spot tapas restaurant, Barcelona. He was wearing almost the exact same outfit, and his unconventional charms abounded. We joined him for tequila and late-night professorial chit chat at the home of his friend, a member of the university faculty.

But back to the British: in his old age, Darwin became a “pigeon-fancier,” which means that he was “not at all snobby.”

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