Fresh attack on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers after Just Stop Oil activists jailed

Protesters target same painting that Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland threw soup at in 2022

Just Stop Oil has thrown soup over two of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings in “a sign of defiance” after two of their members were jailed for a similar protest.
On Friday, three protesters entered the Van Gogh “Poets and Lovers” exhibition at the National Gallery in London and threw soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
It comes after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed on Friday for two years and 20 months respectively for throwing soup over the same 1888 painting in October 2022.
Just Stop Oil claims similar actions of solidarity took place in Berlin, where protesters gathered outside the British embassy holding “Solidarity with the Soup Throwers” signs.
The National Gallery said the three activists had been arrested and the paintings remain unharmed after the incident at 2.30pm.
A statement said: “The paintings were removed from display and examined by a conservator and are unharmed. We are aiming to reopen the exhibition as soon as possible.”
In a video on social media, one protester said: “Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.”
Holland and Plummer, both 22, were found guilty of criminal damage at Southwark Crown Court in July.
During their trial, it was heard the activists, who denied damaging the painting, caused as much as £10,000 worth of damage to the frame, which prosecutors said was “a piece of art in itself”.
The protesters, wearing Just Stop Oil T-shirts, threw two tins of Heinz tomato soup over the 1888 work in October 2022, before kneeling down in front of the painting and gluing their hands to the wall beneath it.
Visitors were escorted out by security staff, who then shut the doors to the room containing the painting.
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.”
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, with two supporters gluing themselves to John Constable’s The Hay Wain in July of that year.
In a video from the attack, Plummer was heard saying: “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.”
Sentencing the eco-activists, Judge Christopher Hehir said the painting could have been “seriously damaged or even destroyed”.
“Soup might have seeped through the glass,” he continued. “You couldn’t have cared less if the painting was damaged or not. You had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers.”
Judge Hehir interrupted Plummer when she referred to herself as a “political prisoner”. He said: “This is not helping your case, you’re reading from a Just Stop Oil script, and I’ve heard it all before.
“You understand we don’t have political prisoners in this country, there are people suffering in dungeons all over the world. What you’re doing is making an offensive comparison.”
He said the pair had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.
Addressing Plummer directly, he added: “The suggestion that you and others like you who are convicted by juries of your peers are somehow a political prisoner is ludicrous, self-indulgent and offensive.
“Perhaps some day you will come to realise that but I fear that day is a long way off.”
Plummer also received a three-month jail term for her part in a slow march that caused long tailbacks in west London in November 2023.