London, protest against fossil fuels and damage Constable's masterpiece

The campaign in British museums by activists from Just Stop Oil, an environmental group protesting the use of fossil fuels, is not yet over: after targeting London’s Courtauld Gallery, Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery in recent days, members of the group protested at London’s National Gallery yesterday, July 4, but this time the painting they selected was slightly damaged.

The modus operandi is more or less always the same: two activists from the group enter a museum, douse their hands with glue and stick to the frame of the selected painting, chanting anti-fossil slogans, or writing them directly on the wall or floor, as they did in Glasgow and Manchester, using spray cans. However, this time they did something else: they actually attached a “modern” version of the painting to the canvas(The Hay Wagon, one of John Constable’s greatest masterpieces, painted in 1821). Constable’s painting depicts a Suffolk countryside, and the environmentalists have covered it with a canvas where instead of a stream there is a paved road, where the trees are withered, and where the sky is furrowed by airplanes. The problem is that to attach their canvas they caused some damage to the varnish of Constable’s painting, according to a museum spokesman told the BBC. Nothing serious, of course: the colors were not affected and the National Gallery’s restorers immediately fixed the problem, so much so that the work was already scheduled to be returned to its room today.

The two young protagonists of the action (Hannah Hunt, 23, a psychology student from Brighton, and Eben Lazarus, 22, a music student also from Brighton) repeated the usual motivations of their “colleagues” who have conducted similar actions at other museums in recent days. “I support Just Stop Oil, calling for an immediate end to all new oil and gas in the UK,” Lazarus said. “I want to work in the arts, not disrupt them, but the situation we’re in means we have to do everything we can in a nonviolent way to prevent the total collapse of our orderly society. We covered the ’Hay Wagon’ with a reinvented version that illustrates the impact of our dependence on fossil fuels on our countryside. The painting is an important part of our heritage, but it is no more important than the 3.5 billion men, women and children already in danger from the climate crisis.”

Instead, Hunt downplayed the damage done to the painting, “yes, there is glue on the frame of the painting, but there is blood on the hands of our government.” And the group’s activists certainly have no plans to stop.

London, protest against fossil fuels and damage Constable's masterpiece

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