Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers after fellow protesters jailed

Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.

Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.

The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.

“Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history,” Phil Green, one of those taking part in Friday’s action, told visitors to the gallery.

Ludi Simpson, 71, who also took part, 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?”

The protest came almost exactly an hour after Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years in prison for causing an estimated £10,000 of damage to the frame of Sunflowers 1888. Her co-defendant, Anna Holland, 22, received 20 months for the same offence.

Passing sentence at Southwark crown court on Friday, the judge, Christopher Hehir, told them: “You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation.

“The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

The defendants embraced and blew kisses to the public gallery from the dock before they were led down to the cells.

In October 2022, Plummer and Holland had gone to room 43 of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and hurled two tins of soup over the 1888 painting, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, before glueing themselves to the wall beneath it.

In July, they were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury after three hours of deliberations. Judge Hehir told them at the time to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison”.

Plummer was further sentenced to three months in jail for interfering with national infrastructure by taking part in a slow march along Earls Court Road in west London in November 2023. Her co-defendants in that case, Chiara Sarti and Daniel Hall, received suspended sentences and community work orders.

Plummer gave a 20-minute address to the judge in mitigation, in which she cited Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as examples of people who had been criminalised while fighting for justice.

“On 14 October 2022 and in November 2023 I made the choices to take actions that I knew would likely lead to my arrest and prosecution,” she said. “I made those choices because I believe that non-violent civil resistance is the best, if not the only, tool that people have in order to bring about the rapid change required to protect life from the accelerating climate emergency and the political decisions being made that pour fuel on the flames and which sentence us all to a catastrophic future.

“Whilst of course there are reasons why my life and the lives of people I love and care for would be easier if I don’t receive prison sentences today I don’t intend to go into detail about these, my choice today is to accept whatever sentences I receive with a smile, knowing that I have found peace in doing what I can to defend countless millions of innocent people suffering and dying.”

She added: “I chose to peacefully disrupt a business-as-usual system that is unjust, dishonest and murderous.”

In passing his sentence, Hehir said he took into account not only the damage caused to the frame but the potential for even greater damage to be caused to the painting had the soup seeped behind the glass that covered it.

Hehir told them: “Section 63 of the sentencing code requires me, in assessing the seriousness of your offending, to consider not only the harm your offence caused, but also the harm it might foreseeably have caused. For the reasons I have explained, that foreseeable harm is incalculable. Your offending is so serious that only custodial sentences are appropriate.”

Hehir noted that gallery staff had immediately taken the painting away to examine it and ensure it had come to no serious harm.