A young poet and climate activist who took part in a Just Stop Oil protest which involved throwing soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022 has been jailed.

Anna Holland, aged 22, a postgraduate student taking an MA in writing poetry at Newcastle University, was given 20 months for causing £10,000 worth of damage to the artwork’s frame, but will serve only half of her sentence in custody. Her co-defendant Phoebe Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years.

Immediately following the sentences, other Just Stop Oil supporters threw soup over two of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings at the National Gallery. At around 2.30pm, three supporters of Just Stop Oil entered the Van Gogh ‘Poets and Lovers’ exhibition and threw Heinz vegetable soup over ‘Sunflowers’ 1889 and ‘Sunflowers’ 1888. The latter was splashed with soup by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022.

Taking off jackets they revealed Just Stop Oil T-shirts and spoke to exhibition visitors. Referring to the 25 Just Stop Oil supporters now in prison, Phil Green said: "Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.” Ludi Simpson said: “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?”

In October 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland had gone to room 43 of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and hurled two tins of Heinz soup over the 1888 painting, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, before gluing themselves to the wall beneath it. In July, they were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury after three hours of deliberations. The judge, Christopher Hehir, told them at the time to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison”.

Plummer gave a 20-minute address to the judge in mitigation, in which she cited Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as examples of people who had been criminalised while fighting for justice. Outside the court, a number of Just Stop Oil supporters gathered, some of whom held posters of historical figures jailed for activism.

Staff at the gallery were worried the soup may have dripped through the protective glass and destroyed the painting, the court heard. It also heard that the damaged frame had been purchased by the gallery in 1999 and was valued at £28,000.

Sentencing the pair, the judge said the "cultural treasure" could have been "seriously damaged or even destroyed". The judge, who previously jailed the co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion for five years, added that "soup might have seeped through the glass. You couldn't have cared less if the painting was damaged or not. You had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers," he said.

Raj Chada, defending Anna Holland, said the women "did check" that the painting was protected by a glass cover before throwing the soup.

In a Crowdfunder appeal launched after the guilty verdict in July Anna Holland said: “On October 14th, 2022, Phoebe Plummer and I threw tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the National Gallery. We asked the question ‘what is worth more: art or life?’ On July 25th, 2024, the courts answered that question. They decided that art was more important and found us guilty of criminal damage.

“Judge Hehir - who recently made headlines by giving the longest prison sentences for non-violent protest in British history - has set our sentencing for September 27th, 2024 and is expected to give us both prison sentences in order to deter any similar actions from taking place. This is a gross misuse of his power, especially at a time when prisons are dangerously full and the country has far more pressing concerns than two young people who took action for the climate two years ago.”

In a video Anna Holland talked of the soup-throwing action as being “life-changing, in all of the best ways … one of the most empowering moments of my life … it got everyone talking about the climate crisis.” She added that a lot of the “moral outrage” was “quite misguided … we had just thrown soup on the protective glass”.   

Just Stop Oil is demanding that governments work together to establish a fossil fuel treaty, to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.