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Just Stop Oil Sunflowers protest

2020s in the City of Westminster2022 crimes in the United Kingdom2022 in London2024 in EnglandCrime in the City of Westminster
Direct actionEnvironmental protests in the United KingdomNational Gallery, LondonOctober 2022 in the United KingdomProtests in LondonRadical environmentalismUse British English from October 2024Vandalized works of art in the United KingdomVincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh 127
Vincent Willem van Gogh 127

The Just Stop Oil Sunflowers protest refers to an incident that occurred on 14 October 2022 at the National Gallery in London, United Kingdom. Two Just Stop Oil activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, each threw the contents of a tin of Heinz tomato soup at an 1888 Sunflowers painting by Vincent van Gogh before gluing themselves to the wall it hung on and asking onlookers whether they were more concerned by the protest or by the effects of climate change on the planet. The activists, who were motivated by a decrease in media coverage of the organisation's activism, had selected the painting as a target due to its vulnerability; as a result of the act, approximately £10,000 worth of damage was caused to the painting's frame. A video recording of the protest was published on social media, attracting worldwide censure. While Plummer and Holland were subjected to homophobic abuse following the protest, it inspired several subsequent protests involving throwing food products at paintings. Convicted of criminal damage in July 2024, Plummer and Holland received prison sentences of 2 years and 20 months, respectively.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Just Stop Oil Sunflowers protest (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Just Stop Oil Sunflowers protest
St Martin's Place, City of Westminster Covent Garden

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N 51.508888888889 ° E -0.12777777777778 °
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Muriel's Kitchen

St Martin's Place
WC2N 5DN City of Westminster, Covent Garden
England, United Kingdom
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Vincent Willem van Gogh 127
Vincent Willem van Gogh 127
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National Gallery
National Gallery

The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.The Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the government on behalf of the British public, and entry to the main collection is free of charge. In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic it attracted only 1,197,143 visitors, a drop of 50 per cent from 2019, but it still ranked eighth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase, the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, especially Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which now account for two-thirds of the collection. The collection is smaller than many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case. The present building, the third to house the National Gallery, was designed by William Wilkins from 1832 to 1838. Only the facade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. Wilkins's building was often criticised for the perceived weaknesses of its design and for its lack of space; the latter problem led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897. The Sainsbury Wing, a 1991 extension to the west by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, is a significant example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain. The current Director of the National Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi.