Two Brighton students glued themselves to the frame of John Constable’s masterpiece The Hay Wain.
The Just Stop Oil protesters also attached their own image of “an apocalyptic vision of the future” of the landscape, on three large sheets of paper, featuring an old car dumped in front of the mill and the Hay Wain cart carrying an old washing machine.
The protesters struck at the National Gallery, in London, at 2.15pm yesterday (Monday 4 July). Art lovers, tourists and a class of 11-year-old children on a school trip were then evacuated from the room where the painting hangs.
The pair were later named by Just Stop Oil as music student Eben Lazarus, 22, and psychology student Hannah Hunt, 23, both from Brighton.
They wore white t-shirts, bearing the logo Just Stop Oil, and stepped over a rope barrier before placing the printed coloured paper on to the front of the painting.
Each also placed a hand on the frame of the painting and kneeled beneath it before loudly outlining their concerns as visitors were ushered out by security staff.
During the protest Lazarus, who described himself himself as an art lover, said: “Art is important. It should be held for future generations to see but when there is no food what use is art?
“When there is no water, what use is art? When billions of people are in pain and suffering, what use then is art?”
The Hay Wain, which was painted in 1821, is one of the most popular paintings at the gallery and shows a rural Suffolk scene of a wagon returning to the fields across a shallow ford for another load.
Lazarus said: “We have stuck a reimagined version of the Hay Wain that demonstrates our road to disaster.”
Hunt later said: “The disruption will end when the UK government makes a meaningful statement that it will end new oil and gas licences.”
She added: “I’m here because our government plans to license 40 new UK oil and gas projects in the next few years.
“This makes them complicit in pushing the world towards an unliveable climate and in the death of billions of people in the coming decades.
“You can forget our ‘green and pleasant land’ when further oil extraction will lead to widespread crop failures which means we will be fighting for food. Ultimately, new fossil fuels are a death project by our government.
“So, yes, there is glue on the frame of this painting but there is blood on the hands of our government.”
A spokesman for the National Gallery said that the room was closed to the public and police were called.
The spokesman said later: “The painting was removed from the wall to be examined by our conservation team. The Hay Wain suffered minor damage to its frame and there was also some disruption to the surface of the varnish on the painting – both of which have now been successfully dealt with.
“The painting will be rehung in Room 34 ready for when the National Gallery opens at 10am on Tuesday.”
The Metropolitan Police said: “At approximately 2.25pm on Monday officers were called to a protest taking place inside the National Gallery involving two people.
“Two people were arrested.”
It is the latest demonstration by the group which in the past week has allegedly targeted a Scottish art gallery and stormed the British Grand Prix on Sunday.
Well done them. The youth now stand up for themselves. BLM, banning statues, cycle lanes, gay lives matter, more benefits. Folk need to get behind them for standing up. Mindfulness will follow
“The painting will be rehung in Room 34 ready for when the National Gallery opens at 10am on Tuesday.”
Pity they won’t hang the idiots at the same time. As for the glueing, they should have left them there overnight. Mindlessness will follow.
There was something on the news or in a paper the other day where some protestors glued themselves to a road and the police just literally dragged them straight off the road, ripping the skin off the idiots’ hands in the process. The idiots howled in pain. In Europe somewhere, certainly not the UK.