At a certain moment near the midpoint of the 18th century, British culture began to grow weary of its own augustness. After two generations, the eternal sunshine of Alexander Pope, the enlightened wit of Henry Fielding, and the disabused cynicism of William Hogarth moved certain sensitive souls to yearn for something other, and something more. The halation of mystery, of shadowy, unseen things began hesitantly to haunt the poems of Thomas Gray and Edward Young, as well as the drawings of William Blake and Alexander Cozens.

One of the towering figures of this cultural shift, stranded as he was between the Augustan and Rococo ages on the one hand and Romanticism on the other, was the great painter Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97). It has been nearly 20 years since the Metropolitan Museum of Art (together with the Tate) mounted its monumental retrospective of the artist, and now the Yale Center for British Art has revisited the subject. But the focus of the Yale exhibition is far humbler than that of its predecessor. Limiting itself largely to the period between the autumn of 1768 and the summer of 1771, when Wright left Derby to live in Liverpool, the exhibition provides a splendid account of what happens — what waves are made — when an artist of the very first rank settles in what was, relatively, a provincial backwater.

That is all very well for Liverpool, but for Wright its significance is less clear. Some of the 82 paintings, drawings, and engravings on view at Yale precede the artist’s Liverpudlian sojourn, while others follow it. As for those works he produced during the designated period, there is a clear stylistic and thematic overlap with what came before and after. In short, it is hard to find any deep formal conviction associated with Wright’s time in Liverpool, such as we find with Gauguin in Brittany or Matisse in the south of France.

We may speculate that one of the reasons for which Wright moved to Liverpool was a sense that he was not sufficiently valued by his colleagues, whether in Derby or in London. Indeed, when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, its 30 initial members did not find him quite worthy to sit among them. And yet, for all that, Joseph Wright of Derby was — portraiture aside — the finest British painter of the 18th century. Even his portraits were very good. His portraits of Fleetwood and Frances Hesketh, on view at Yale, may not have the tactile splendor of Gainsborough, nor the compositional and thematic freshness of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but they lack nothing in the delineation of character or the ability to conceive an image as pure pattern. What characterizes them most of all is their sunlit brilliance, combined with a fastidious precision in the rendering of details that recalls Wright’s contemporary, the German-born Johann Zoffany.

But at the same time Wright was painting these light-filled portraits, he was fascinated by the potential of chiaroscuro, those lightning flashes that were so dear to the Baroque and so alien to the Augustan Age. In part, Wright was influenced by the followers of Caravaggio, especially in a work such as “Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight.” But more often Wright appears to have been studying the Dutch masters. This is especially evident in the artist’s “Self-Portrait Head in a Fur Cap,” which is clearly modeled on an early self-portrait of Rembrandt in a turban.

In other works at Yale, including two versions of his “Blacksmith’s Shop” — an “Academy by Lamplight” and a “Philosopher by Lamplight” — Wright shows, in the precision of his details, the influence of the so-called fijn schilders, or fine painters, of Holland — Gerrit Dou and Godfried Schalcken, among others. In a general way, these paintings, despite their relatively large size, should be characterized as genre scenes, general depictions of types, but types infused with a wealth of specific details. They are boldly conceived and boldly executed, and their boisterous use of chiaroscuro would have seemed, to their Augustan contemporaries, like a bolt from the blue.

If there is one formal conviction that seems to have disappeared from Wright’s chiaroscuro paintings in Liverpool, however, it is that quest for harmonious compositions that was evident in his earlier works. Some trace of this quality is to be found in “Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight,” but that painting, from 1765, preceded his move to Liverpool by three years.

This quality is most evident in two of Wright’s noblest works, “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery” and “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.” More than any other image in two dimensions, these paintings harness and exalt the questing spirit of the so-called Scientific Revolution, soon to become the Industrial Revolution. But from a purely artistic point of view, their greatest triumph is the skill with which a thousand details have been deftly marshaled so as to reinforce, in the subtlest way imaginable, the ovoid thrust of the composition as a whole. Such compositional skill, which had been born in the Florentine Quattrocento and died out in the Baroque, saw this one, improbable moment of St. Martin’s summer in the earlier works of Joseph Wright of Derby. But then it disappeared from his paintings, and so from painting in general, and it has never returned.

Until August 30 (1080 Chapel St., New Haven, Conn., 203-432-2800).