London National Gallery Head Says Just Stop Oil Protests Targeting Artworks Were a ‘Sad Thing’: ‘The Pictures Are Not Guilty’

Between 2022 and 2024, the National Gallery in London was the site of three of the most public-facing protests by Just Stop Oil, the environmental activist group that controversially splashed liquids across two van Gogh paintings and hammered at the display case of a Velázquez (without causing any lasting to the paintings themselves). The protests earned a mixture of admiration and condemnation, and the actions’ detractors now even include the National Gallery’s director, who addressed Just Stop Oil in a new Telegraph profile.

Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery since 2015, called the Just Stop Oil protests “a sad thing” and seemed to suggest that the group’s activism was misguided.

“Those attacks were very shocking,” Finaldi said. “The pictures are not guilty. The activists were seeking front-page coverage for their cause. They know that to attack a painting gets you front-page coverage across the world, while breaking the windows of an insurance company probably doesn’t.”

Moreover, he added, “People may have legitimate reasons to promote a particular cause. What I would say is: ‘Don’t come to the National Gallery to do it.’”

The National Gallery was hardly the only museum that suffered an environmentalist protest involving an artwork between 2022 and 2024. But it is, in many ways, the museum is where the mini-movement began.

In 2022, two Just Stop Oil activists threw what appeared to be tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889), one of the National Gallery’s many masterpieces, then proceeded to glue themselves to the work. Their protest was said at the time to have caused roughly £10,000 in damage, primarily to the work’s frame, and the two activists subsequently received prison sentences. In 2025, the group formally ceased its protests after the UK adopted a new climate policy.

In the months afterward after the initial 2022 demonstration, other activist groups picked up the cause, staging similar protests at venues ranging from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to the Louvre in Paris.

Finaldi’s Telegraph profile also saw him wade into another controversial issue: the increasingly vexed relationship between the National Gallery and the Tate museum network. In years past, a formal agreement has seen that the National Gallery’s presentations do not run past the year 1900 and that the Tate museums exclusively handle modern and contemporary art. (Both collections are managed by the British state.)

But with the National Gallery now at work on a significant expansion that would include space for art made after 1900, Finaldi has expressed frustration about the agreement and has sought to upend it.

Noting that the “20th century is already present in the National Gallery’s collection,” he told the Telegraph, “We and the Tate are both part of the great national collection, and this would lead to a slight increase in the overlap of our collections. But we tell the stories in different ways, and the 20th century is quite a big century.”