The Gainsborough slasher

The usual quiet of the National Gallery was broken at 2.15pm last Saturday, when a 63year-old man started slashing at The Morning Walk – a 1785 painting by Thomas Gainsborough (pictured) – with a screwdriver. Keith Gregory, of no fixed abode, was soon overpowered by gallery assistants and visitors and then arrested, but not before inflicting two long scratches in the paintwork. It was a “shocking attack”, said Mark Bills, director of Gainsborough’s House, the artist’s former home in Suffolk, not least because “it’s a picture I can’t imagine anybody finding offensive – what an odd thing to want to do”. Yet though unusual, an assault like this has a long history, said Bills and “we all prepare for it in museums”. Suffragette Mary Richardson slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a cleaver in a political protest. A Polish artist was jailed in 2012 for defacing a Rothko in Tate Modern. And the Mona Lisa has been attacked at least three times: twice in 1956, and once in 2009. It is now shielded by bulletproof