two young men in orange t-shirts stand by a large traditional landscape painting in a museum, one has his hand attached to the frame and the other is putting something on his hand. "no new oil' is spray painted in purple on the floor below the painting.
Just Stop Oil target Turner painting at Manchester Art Gallery in 2022. Photo courtesy of Just Stop Oil.

Two Just Stop Oil activists who glued themselves to a J.M.W. Turner painting at Manchester Art Gallery have been spared jail time today. A judge at Manchester Magistrates’ Court ruled that the pair were not guilty, and their action was proportionate in the face of the climate crisis. The acquittal stands in contrast to prison sentences handed last week to two protesters who threw soup over a Vincent van Gogh painting.

On July 1, 2022, Eddie Whittingham, 27, and Paul Bell, 24, entered Manchester Art Gallery and spray painted the words “No New Oil” on the floor in chalk just below Turner’s tranquil landscape painting Tomson’s Aeolian Harp (1809). They then glued their hands to the artwork’s frame.

In court today, the pair were charged with criminal damage of less than £5,000 ($6,600) for damage to the painting’s frame and the gallery floor. A news release by Just Stop Oil has claimed that they were acquitted because the Manchester district judge ruled that their action was a proportionate measure in light of the climate crisis.

 

“In the courtroom today I told the judge that my actions were not out of a hatred of art, but out of a love for art,” Bell said in a press statement. “The artists of tomorrow and many around the world right now are having their chance to create stolen by the climate crisis.”

The decision comes less than one week after two other Just Stop Oil activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, who threw soup at a Van Gogh painting at the National Gallery in London in 2022, were given prison sentences of two years and 20 months respectively.

They had targeted the Post-Impressionist’s Sunflowers painting, and though the painting itself was protected by a glass cover and unharmed by the incident, prosecutors alleged that the soup acted as “paint stripper” to its valuable frame. This may have caused as much as £10,000 ($13,000) worth of damage, though the pair denied having damaged the property.

“Paul and I are rightly at liberty,” said Whittingham. He said the sentencing of Plummer and Holland “demonstrated that our justice system is broken, the law is failing us and the judiciary and courts are complicit in genocide.”

There are currently 14 Just Stop Oil supporters serving prison sentences of up to 5 years in the U.K.