I am fully supportive of the Just Stop Oil campaign, and acknowledge the need for rousing tactics to counteract a business-as-usual mentality. However, the attack on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting was misguided (Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, 14 October).
Van Gogh cared deeply for nature, and for humanity; he was a missionary before he became a painter. He was poor, he lived simply, and his passion was to reveal the extraordinary beauty of nature to those who could not see it. For his magnificent gift to humanity to become a target for environmentalists is a violation of all that the painting upholds.
