Climate protesters threw mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting in a German museum earlier this week to protest fossil fuel extraction, an attack followed up yesterday by a similar action involving tomatoes tossed against the Johannes Vermeer masterpiece “Girl with a Pearl Earring” at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

In both cases, the paintings were not damaged.

In Holland, one of the attackers, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Just Stop Oil” shouts, “How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your eyes? Do you feel outrage? Good. That is the feeling when you see the planet being destroyed before our very eyes.”

He pointed out that the painting is protected by glass as one visitor to the museum shouted: “Shame on you!”

In Germany, two activists from the group Last Generation, which has called on the German government to take drastic action to protect the climate and stop using fossil fuels, approached Monet’s “Les Meules” at Potsdam’s Barberini Museum and threw a thick substance over the painting and its gold frame.

The group later confirmed via a post on Twitter that the mixture was mashed potatoes. The two activists, both wearing orange high-visibility vests, also glued themselves to the wall below the painting.

“If it takes a painting – with mashed potatoes or tomato soup thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all, then we’ll give you mashed potatoes on a painting!” the group posted on Twitter, along with a video of the incident.

The Barberini Museum said that because the impressionist painting, which had sold for $110.7 million at a 2019 auction, was enclosed in glass, the mashed potatoes didn’t cause any damage.

“While I understand the activists’ urgent concern in the face of the climate catastrophe, I am shocked by the means with which they are trying to lend weight to their demands,” museum director Ortrud Westheider said.

The paintings were the latest museum artworks to be targeted by climate activists to draw attention to global warming.

The Just Stop Oil group threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery earlier this month. And activists from the British group also glued themselves to the frame of an early copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and to John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” in the National Gallery.