Climate Activists Who Souped Van Gogh’s Sunflowers Sentenced to Prison

Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, two young protesters affiliated with environmental activist groupJust Stop Oil, have been sentenced to prison forhurlingtomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 paintingSunflowersin an effort to bring awareness to the effects of climate change and to government subsidies of fossil fuels. The action, which took place at London’s National Gallery in October 2022 before astonished onlookers, resulted in slight damage to the work’s frame; the canvas itself was unharmed. On September 27, Southwark Crown Court judge Christopher Hehir sentenced Plummer, 23, to twenty-seven months in prison and Holland, 22, to twenty months, of which she will serve only half in custody.

“You two simply had no right to do what you did toSunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation,” Hehir declared in handing down the sentence. “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.” Among the reasons Hehir cited for the punishment meted out was that the soup “might have seeped through the glass,” noting, perThe Guardian, “The sentencing code requires me, in assessing the seriousness of your offending, to consider not only the harm your offense caused, but also the harm it might foreseeably have caused. . . . That foreseeable harm is incalculable. Your offending is so serious that only custodial sentences are appropriate.”

The sentences arrived after more than a hundred artists and academics petitioned for the protesters not to be jailed. The petition, organized by Greenpeace UK and British art collective Liberate Tate, argued that “art can be, and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.”

Hehir this past July sentenced five Just Stop Oil protesters to record jail terms for conspiring to blocking London’s M25 motorway in November 2022 to protest climate change. He has not always been known for dishing out heavy penalties. The judge earlier this year was referred to the court of appeal by the solicitor general for having awarded an “unduly lenient” suspended sentence to a police officer who had sex in a patrol car with an inebriated woman whom he had offered to take home. Hehir had cast the decision not to jail the officer, whom he acknowledged had “humiliated” the woman, as “an act of mercy”; the court of appeal threw out Hehir’s sentence and jailed the offender for eleven months. As well, the BBC reported that Hehir last year issued suspended sentences to a man who had intentionally crashed his car into the gates of Downing Street and had then been found to have indecent images of children on his phone.