On July 17 1914, Margaret Gibb, a Scottish woman in her thirties, walked into London’s National Portrait Gallery and started looking at the paintings. She took out a butcher’s cleaver from her dress and smashed the glass on a portrait of the historian Thomas Carlyle. She then cut her knife through the canvas at least three times, leaving scars through Carlyle’s forehead and left ear.
Gibb was arrested following a “severe struggle” and gave the police a false name. Newspapers ridiculed her. After a short trial, during which she claimed that the painting would have “added value” because of her actions, she was sentenced to six months in jail. She was released within days, because, like many suffragettes, she started a hunger strike that left the authorities with no good options.
