A day at the seaside: stripey deckchairs, a pebbly shore, groynes, choppy sea, swimwear and towels drying on a line and the edge of a brightly coloured beach hut. It's a very English scene. And look, even the sun is out. Surely everybody's having fun? Sadly, the painter -- a very English artist -- wasn't enjoying himself. Stanley Spencer had come back to Suffolk, a place where he'd previously known happiness, seeking solace after divorce from his first wife and the almost immediate breakdown of his second marriage. On the beach at Southwold, there was an air of "suburban seaside abandonment", he wrote in his notebook. But painting it, he was separated from the jollity by the high sea wall. "I felt a kindred feeling with the bathing suits in the line in front of me in the scene that they seemed to be taking no part, as I was not, with the activities on the beach." The tale is told and the painting can be seen in Suffolk now, at Gainsborough's Ho...
Peter Paul Rubens' Rainbow Landscape -- that symbol of hope seems a fitting image to start with this month as the weather finally turns summery and the coronavirus pandemic looks to be on the wane, variants permitting. June 3 will see the painting brought together at London's Wallace Collection with its companion piece, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning from the National Gallery, for the first time in 200 years. Het Steen was Rubens' country estate outside Antwerp, and these paintings appear to have been made for his own pleasure. Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes is free of charge, though there's a suggested £5 donation, and it runs until August 15. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern is, in principle, meant to be open to the general public from June 14, but the Tate says all tickets up to October 24 are sold out and the next lot won't be released until September. So you can either mock up your own Kusama-inspired immersive installati...