A priceless Banksy mural has reportedly been vandalised just three days after it appeared on the side of a house.
The artwork - which features a mass of green paint behind a mature tree to resemble foliage and a stencil of a person with a pressure hose - was spotted on the wall near Finsbury Park in London on Monday.
Elusive artist Banksy confirmed it was his with a post on his Instagram page a few hours later.
However, distraught art fans discovered on Wednesday that white paint has been chucked on the artwork - potentially ruining it.
The apparent act of vandalism comes despite the local council erecting a metal fence to try and protect it. Banksy fan and photographer Matt Adamiak, 42, took pictures of the artwork this morning - and reckons the culprit climbed over the fence to throw the paint.
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A protective fence had been erected around the artwork after it appeared on Monday (w8media)Matt, from Southampton, said: "I've always been Banksy fan so when I saw he’d been out and about I headed up the motorway this morning to have a look. I got there at 6am this morning as it was getting light, there was hardly anyone around. Then I noticed someone had thrown white paint or something over it.
The mural includes a stencil of a person with a pressure hose (Anadolu via Getty Images)“It’s massively noticeable in person - looking at the way it’s been thrown it looks like someone's climbed over the fence to throw it. It’s difficult to tell how they've done it but they’ve definitely ruined it. It's all been cordoned off so people can’t get in there, but it looks like someone had climbed over. Maybe it was someone throwing paint over it to ruin it just because they can, it’s difficult to say.”
A man who spotted the damage believed someone climbed the fence to 'ruin' the artwork (w8media)Banksy's public artworks, which normally appear without any warning, can draw huge crowds to normally quiet areas - and have also been known to attract the wrong kind of attention. In December, a Stop sign altered by Banksy with an image of three drones was removed less than an hour after the elusive street artist posted a photo of it to his social media. Video showed a man with bolt cutters climbing up on a bicycle to remove the work from a sign post on a street corner in the Peckham area of south London, while another man steadied the bike. The man who cut the sign free then ran off with it in his hand.
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