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...
Impressionism shook up the world of art, but that was nothing compared to what followed. After Impressionism at the National Gallery in London, starting on March 25, aims to take us through the revolutionary period from around 1880 to the start of World War I, on to Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, with Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Klimt, Kokoschka, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky and Rodin; among more than 100 works, including loans from around Europe and the US, there'll also be unfamiliar artists like Broncia Koller-Pinell. Until August 13. However, if you're not quite ready for the Post-Impressionists just yet, how about the leading woman Impressionist, who's coming to Dulwich Picture Gallery on March 31? Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism will include more than 30 of her works, nine of them from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, as well as looking at how she drew inspiration from 18th-century paintings by the likes of Fragonard, Watteau, Gainsborough and Reyno...