Just Stop Oil targeted the National Gallery on Friday, hours after a ban on liquids was imposed following a string of activist attacks.

       The rules were introduced on Friday morning after protests in which works by John Constable and Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh were targeted by JSO activists who threw orange paint and soup on them.

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       Updated guidelines state that “no liquids can be brought into the National Gallery, with the exception of baby formula, expressed milk and prescription medicines”.

       But JSO protesters managed to gain access to the gallery and unfurl a banner in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings on Friday, demanding the release of two activists recently imprisoned for throwing soup at the painting in 2022.

       Last month’s sentencing of Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland sparked an immediate response from JSO, with protesters throwing soup over the same paintings hours later.

       Since July 2022, the National Gallery’s collection has been targeted on five occasions. JSO activists vandalised Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Constable’s The Hay Wain, and Diego Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus.

       Pro-Palestinian activists from the group Youth Demand also pasted over Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood in October in protest at the sale of arms to Israel.

       The tougher rules brought in by the gallery as a result caused long queues and confusion amongst tourists on Friday, with visitors urged to only bring essential items and not to take large bags.

       Some had to queue for over an hour, with those unaware of the new rules having to empty bottles of water outside the gallery.

       Visitors were guided through security scanners before four members of staff checked the bags of hundreds of visitors. Any liquids in bags were disposed of in a black bin.

       One visitor, Nina, described the queues as “worse than airport” security, saying: “They need to sort this out. It’s wrong. I’m a member, but I may not be after this.”

       Another visitor reported being in “agony” from the pain of standing in the queue with a back injury, while a third joked: “Just ban tomato soup.”

       A spokesman for the National Gallery said: “We are sorry it is taking longer than usual to access the gallery, and we apologise for this inconvenience. We also apologise that visitors are, for the time being, not receiving the welcome we would very much like to extend to them, but we hope that they understand why it has been necessary for us to do this.”