Just Stop Oil protesters jailed for vandalising van Gogh painting - then three more do the exact same thing

Two protesters have been arrested this afternoon (September 27) for throwing orange-coloured soup at van Gogh’s paintings in the National Gallery, London. It came not long after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for defacing his Sunflowers painting two years ago.

Plummer, 23, and Holland, 22, caused as much as £10,000 worth of damage to the artwork’s gold-coloured frame when they targeted it at London’s National Gallery. Plummer received a two-year jail term, while Holland was handed 20 months.

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. 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 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.”

Three activists from the group later poured soup over two van Gogh paintings at the National Gallery in protest against the ruling.