Just Stop Oil Protesters Who Hurled Tomato Soup at van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ Sentenced to Prison

Two activists from the protest group Just Stop Oil who splashed tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh‘s Sunflowers (1888) at London’s National Gallery in October 2022, have been sentenced to prison.

On September 27, Judge Christopher Hehir of Southwark crown court in London sentenced Phoebe Plummer to two years and three months in prison, and Anna to 20 months. Hehir said in his sentencing that the pair “couldn’t have cared less” if the world famous painting had been ruined, as first quoted by the Art Newspaper.

“Soup might have seeped through the glass,” he said, adding “you had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers.”

Plummer and Holland made international headlines in 2022 by hurling two cans of soup at the canvas, one of the treasures of the National Gallery of Art in London, before supergluing their hands to the nearby wall. There was no damage to the painting itself, however the antique 17th-century Italian frame suffered minor damage. The gesture was one among many committed by Just Stop Oil in the UK, where its young members have sought to force the government to respond more quickly to the climate crisis.

In a video posted to TikTok following the action, Plummer explained their motivations: “We’re not asking the question, should everyone be throwing soup at paintings?” said Plummer. “What we’re doing is getting the conversation going so we can ask the questions that matter.”

The London court was not moved. Plummer and Holland were charged with criminal damage and convicted earlier this year. Hehir told Plummer and Holland at the time to be “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison.”

Some in the art world, however, lauded the soup-tossing. On Thursday, more than 100 artists, curators, art historians, academics, and other art professionals signed an open letter pleading against jail time for Plummer and Holland. The letter was organized by Greenpeace UK and the art collective Liberate Tate, an art collective formed in 2010 in protest of fossil fuel philanthropy in UK art museums, and described the vandalism “an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.” Signatories of the letter including Fiona Banner, Peter Kennard, and Tania Bruguera, as well as art historians and academics from NYU, Goldsmiths, and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

“Plummer and Holland’s protest might have given a nod to art history by using Campbell’s soup instead of Heinz,” the letter said. “It is our expert opinion that it would be incorrect to consider this JSO action, and its social message, as an attack on an artwork from without. Instead, it belongs to the well-established tradition of creative iconoclasm.”