Unfinished Futures: Constable, Turner, and the Ontology of Modern Painting
Modern art did not spring into being with Cubism or the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Its earliest signals are found in painters who, without intending it, rewired the purpose and ontology of paint. Two of the most important are John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Their unfinished surfaces—those scumbled skies, fragmentary trees, dissolving ships and vapour-heavy seas—were misunderstood in their own time, often dismissed as preliminary, rough, or merely eccentric. Today we see them differently: as works that presage the modern idea that meaning in painting lies not only in what is pictured, but in what the material itself is doing. Their paint is not a cover for ideas; it is its own mode of thought. As the United Kingdom marks Turner 250 (2025–26) and prepares for Constable 250 in Suffolk (2026), the unfinished has returned as a curatorial centrepiece. It reminds us that while their subjects were anchored in Georgian and early Victorian England, the ideas they uncovered remain strangely contemporary.
To call a Constable oil sketch “unfinished” is technically true and philosophically misleading. These rapid studies—sky wedges, cloud slabs, wind-sheared fields—were not intended to be glossy, salon-ready canvases. They were laboratories. “Painting,” Constable wrote, “is but another word for feeling,”¹ and the feeling he sought was how light inhabits matter, not how a finish could disguise it. But that feeling was hard-won. Constable often despaired of the impossibility of making paint equivalent to nature. “We see nothing truly till we understand it,” he wrote, “and the labour of making out the chiaroscuro is the great difficulty of landscape.”⁹ Paint could describe a cloud, but could it be weather? Could it stand as more than a “trumpery” imitation of nature’s splendour?
The turning point was realising that fidelity did not mean copying what the eye sees; it meant evoking what the body remembers. A sky of broken strokes is not a cloud, but it feels like one—shifting, unsettled, alive. Only by stimulating memory—our private store of weather, wind, and light—could paint escape being a trinket of nature and become a truth of experience. In this sense, Constable abandoned likeness for equivalence. His paint no longer stood in for the landscape; it enacted its behaviour. The unfinished passages were not steps toward completion, but forms of honesty: where representation failed, evocation could succeed.
It is telling that recent curators have been among the most articulate champions of this shift. Emma Roodhouse, one of the key voices in the 2026 Suffolk programme, describes Constable’s sketches as “the closest we come to standing beside him in the open air—direct, searching, and alive with the weather of the moment.”¹⁰ That claim, brief as it is, captures everything Constable’s contemporaries missed: these works are not studies for something better. They are the point.
This ontological logic—painting not as depiction but as a material analogue of experience—is not historical curiosity. It remains alive in contemporary practice. In my own work, the question is not whether paint can become a figure, a cliff, or a memory; it is whether paint can become an equivalence to their presence. Just as Constable allowed paint to weather into sky, my surfaces accrete, fracture, compress or erode like geological or bodily time. The marks are not illustrations of bodies; they function as material proxies for physical and emotional presence. Where sculpture gains strength through mass, resistance, pressure and void, paint can achieve the same through edge, weight, density and the tactile memory of the hand. In that shared ontological space, both practices insist that truth in art lies not in perfect finish, but in recognisable experience summoned through matter.
Turner suffered similar misreadings. His late works—drenched in light and scarcely tethered to recognisable form—were dismissed by one critic as “indistinct dreams” and “a mass of soapsuds and whitewash.”³ Yet Ruskin, seeing what others could not, insisted that Turner was “the only painter of skies” who made nature “speak in her own tongue.”⁴ The difference between mockery and recognition was not taste but ontology: Turner was pioneering a new relation between subject and substance. Paint no longer represented a storm; it behaved like one. His unfinished passages were demonstrations of paint’s material behaviour: drying, dragging, granulating, veiling. The sky was no longer painted onto the canvas—it emerged through it. The picture became an event, not a description.
One of the governing ideas of modern art is the principle that a medium should acknowledge what it is. Clement Greenberg later called this “truth to materials”: a painting should show that it is made of pigment on ground, not disguise itself as an illusionistic window.⁵ We often date this principle to mid-century formalism, yet Constable and Turner reached it by practice rather than theory. Their unfinished works, once dismissed as careless, are now valued because they show the thinking of paint in real time. Turner’s storms form out of scumble, glaze and stain—layers whose order matters more than their polish. Constable’s cloud studies hold wind as broken impasto, humidity as thin lights, air as bare ground shimmering between strokes.
Contemporary philosophy offers language equal to this insight. Johnny Golding’s work on becoming argues that matter is not passive stuff awaiting form; it is a dynamic field of relations in which material and maker co-form one another. Painting, in this view, is a practice of attending to what material wants to do—not forcing it into obedience, but thinking with it. The unfinished passage records negotiation rather than disguise. When colour sinks, the ground is too absorbent; when a mark locks, the film is drying; when light dies, the sequence is wrong. Failure becomes information. The painter must extend the work by altering pressure, thinning medium, opening the surface, scraping back, or changing order. Constable and Turner show that the answer to failure is rarely to insist harder. It is to listen.
Both artists were mocked because they painted ahead of the language critics had. Constable’s rival, Sir George Beaumont, declared that “a good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown,”⁷ a defence of varnish and academic polish. Today, the very works once dismissed as “mere sketches” must in part form the Midernist centrepiece of Constable 250 across Suffolk in 2026, where curators such as Roodhouse are positioning him not as a pastoral relic, but as a pioneer of material thinking, often at odds to received taste. Turner’s reception was even harsher. “Upon my word,” wrote one reviewer in 1846, “it is difficult to say what Mr Turner means by some of his pictures.”⁸ Yet in our time Turner’s meaning lies precisely in their becoming. This is why Turner 250—at Tate Britain and beyond—frames him not as heritage, but as a living argument about what painting is and does.
Constable and Turner painted a world of coaches, barges, hedgerows and tall ships—forms long gone. Their works are historically situated: Georgian England, early industry, changing coastlines, smoke, steam and sky. Yet their ideas are not. Their real subject was not merely Dedham Vale or the dazzling coastal light at Margate. Their subject was the ontology of painting: what paint is, what it can know, and what it can make us feel. That is why their unfinished still feels like the future. It is why museums are marking these anniversaries not as retrospectives, but as conversations with contemporary art. And it is why painters continue to learn from them—not how to paint a cloud, but how to attend to what the paint is already doing.
The works are bound to their time. The ideas discovered in their unfinished states are not.
Notes
John Constable, letter to Rev. John Fisher, 1821.
The Examiner, review of Royal Academy Exhibition, 1824.
The Morning Chronicle, review of Royal Academy Exhibition, 1843.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. I (London, 1843), p. 74.
Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 1965.
Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. I, p. 105.
Reported in C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1845).
The Athenaeum, review of Royal Academy Exhibition, 1846.
Constable, letter to Rev. John Fisher, 1823.
10.Emma Roodhouse, Suffolk Museums Service, interview for Constable 250 planning briefing, 2024.