Shubtill v Director of Public Prosecutions
London’s National Gallery has stood for 170 years at the northern boundary of Trafalgar Square. Originally conceived by Parliamentary Commission to “give the people an ennobling enjoyment”, the gallery houses paintings which, on any account, are the highest peaks of the grand massif that is the western cultural tradition. Cimabue’s Virgin and Child with Two Angels hangs there. So does Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks. The gallery records the inevitable progress of history: Constable’s The Hay Wain graces a wall not far from Turner’s requiem to the obsolescence of sail and the final, crushing victory of the Industrial Revolution, The Fighting Temeraire. The gallery is just as well endowed with modern art: Cézanne hangs beside Monet, who accompanies Renoir and Rousseau. Accompanying all these French masters is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers a painting whose sister was once the most expensive painting ever sold.
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R v Langley [2022] JCLR 46
As might any building which has stood in central London for 170 years, the gallery has born witness to great change and momentous events, both fair and foul. The erection of Nelson’s Column. The ushering in of the new Millennium. The area has seen its share of political protests: suffragette bombings of 1924, and Poll Tax Riots of 1990.
So I dare say the goings on of Friday 14th October 2022 will not linger over the aeons: fairer things, and fouler ones, will soon wipe them from the collected consiousness, just as a stout sponge might remove carelessly spilt soup. But alas, these events are on our agenda for todays proceedings, so, tiresome as they undoubtedly are, it falls to me to recount them.
On Friday, two young women entered room 43 of the Gallery, opened cans of tomato soup, and emptied them onto Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I remark at once that these were not cans of Cambell’s soup, which might hab