JSO stages fresh attack on Van Gogh paintings hours after two activists jailed for same thing
Just Stop Oil activists have thrown soup over two Van Gogh paintings just hours after their fellow protesters were jailed for doing the same.
At around 2:30pm, three supporters of Just Stop Oil entered the Van Gogh ‘Poets and Lovers’ exhibition at the National Gallery and threw Heinz vegetable soup over two Van Gogh ‘Sunflowers’ paintings.
One of the paintings- ‘Sunflowers 1888’ was the same one targeted by Phoebe Plummer 23, and Anna Holland, 22, who were today jailed for a total of three years and eight months for vandalising the artwork with soup in October 2022.
After dousing the paintings in soup, the protesters took off their jackets to reveal Just Stop Oil t-shirts and told the assembled crowd: ‘Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.’
Another said: ‘We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?’
Plummer and Holland were today jailed for carrying out a similar stunt in 2022, throwing two tins of Heinz tomato soup over the 1888 work before kneeling down in front of the painting and glueing their hands to the wall beneath it.
Staff at the gallery inspected the painting and frame for damage while the women were still attached to the wall, and were worried the soup may have dripped through the protective glass.
The frame was purchased by the gallery in 1999, the court heard, and was valued at £28,000 before it suffered the estimated £10,000 worth of damage.
Sentencing the women, Judge Christopher Hehir said the ‘cultural treasure’ could have been ‘seriously damaged or even destroyed’.
Judge Hehir, who previously jailed the co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion for five years, continued: ‘Soup might have seeped through the glass.
‘You couldn’t have cared less if the painting was damaged or not.
‘You had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers.’
The judge told Plummer, who received a two year sentence and was also handed a criminal behaviour order: ‘You clearly think your beliefs give you the right to commit crimes when you feel like it. You do not.’
Raj Chada, defending Holland, said the women ‘did check’ that the painting was protected by a glass cover before throwing the soup.
Plummer, representing herself, told the hearing: ‘My choice today is to accept whatever sentence I receive with a smile.
‘It is not just myself being sentenced today, or my co-defendants, but the foundations of democracy itself.’
Judge Hehir said it was ‘offensive’ for Plummer to portray herself as a political prisoner ‘when you think of the people in dungeons around the world.
‘We don’t have political prisoners in this country,’ he added.
Plummer was also handed a three-month sentence for her part in a slow march which caused long tailbacks in west London in November 2023.
Holland and Plummer were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury after three hours of deliberation in July, after which Judge Hehir said they ‘came within the width of a pane of glass of destroying one of the most valuable artworks in the world’.
Painted in Arles in the south of France in August 1888, van Gogh’s painting shows 15 sunflowers standing in a yellow pot against a yellow background.
The priceless work was the second from the National Gallery to be selected as a target for protest action by Just Stop Oil in 2022.
Two supporters glued themselves to John Constable’s The Hay Wain in July of that year.
In 2022, Plummer said in front of the painting: ‘What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice?
‘Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people? The cost-of-living crisis is part of the cost-of-oil crisis.’
In July, just five days after her guilty verdict, Plummer was arrested for spraying paint on departure boards at Heathrow Airport.
A number of Just Stop Oil supporters gathered outside the court, some of whom held posters of historical figures jailed for activism.
Plummer received a two-year jail term, while Holland was handed 20 months.
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