In July, two protestors with the eco-activist organization Just Stop Oil covered John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain (1821) with a poster showing a decidedly less-than idyllic tableau of the English countryside than Constable had depicted. The two activists involved in the protest, Hannah Hunt and Eden Lazarus, both in their early twenties, were charged with criminal damage by a judge yesterday.
Though the activists’s argued that their actions should be protected by free speech, the judge said that the damage caused was “significant, not trivial” and that the activists had been “reckless”, the Guardian reported.
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However, the sentencing was more lenient than the prosecutors hoped. The prosecutors had asked that the activists receive jail time for their actions, but in the end the two were sentenced to paying approximately $660 each to the National Gallery, the price the gallery paid to restore the minor damages done to The Hay Wain as well as add a fitted sheet of glass to protect the painting from future harm.
Fadi Farhat, a lawyer with the English firm Gulbenkian Andonian, said that the sentencing was fairly lenient.
“When it comes to freedom of speech and criminal damages, it’s a balancing act,” said Farhat in an interview with ARTnews. “The exchange of ideas is sacred, but your ability to express an idea does not extend to impacting the property of the other, the right of the public or individual to enjoy that property.”
However, criminal damages take in to account the kind of damage done, especially when freedom of speech is involved. The painting was not destroyed and the public was not robbed of their ability to enjoy it. The damage was temporary and the work went back on view in a matter of days.
“The criminal damage wasn’t ‘permanent’, there’s no deep seated malice in what they were doing, and they were trying to engage public discourse, that 100% goes into the leniency of the sentencing,” said Farhat. “There is no public interest in getting them to serve a custodial sentence, that is a last result and these are obviously not career criminals.”
However, if the activists reengage in a protest that causes any kind of damage, the case could be reopened and prison time would be on the table.
Following the sentencing, the activists gave the following statement that was then posted to Just Stop Oil’s Twitter:
“This demonstration was an act of expression aimed to raise public awareness of the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, not an endeavour intended to damage private property, nor a reckless, unconsidered act of vandalism.”