Van Gogh, ‘A Wheatfield with Cypresses’ – key

Words and punctuation in bold are dealt with in the notes.

Charles Saumarez Smith
"This animated landscape is by Vincent Van Gogh. He painted it while living at the asylum of St. Rémy in Provence in 1889. The bright colours convey the intense sunlight of the south of France, while the lively brushstrokes capture the effect of the wind, particularly on the rippling wheatfields and windswept clouds. It looks so fresh, it could almost have been painted yesterday. But David Bomford, Head of our Conservation Department, told me that the painting isn’t as robust as it looks."

David Bomford
"Van Gogh’s paintings are very difficult to look after, because they’re very fragile. The canvases are often rather thin and weak, because he wasn’t able to afford very expensive materials, and of course we have the problem that his paint is very thick in some areas, like in the wheatfield itself, and in some of the swirling lines of the clouds; it’s rather thin in other areas, the green of the sky is rather thin and flaky, and you can see in some patches of the sky and at the edges, there’s no paint at all."

Notes

Spelling: landscape (one word, like the word seascape); asylum; convey; swirling; itself (one word)
Did you spell the noun effect with an ‘e‘? The verb meaning the same (i.e. influence) is affect. To effect sth is to carry it out – eg "we need to effect a new policy."
Plurals: canvas and patch both needed ‘es’ in the plural: canvases and patches

Stress
Did you notice the stress was on the 2nd syllable in the following words? asylum; convey; intense; robust; afford; materials; itself
The following words are stressed on the 1st syllable sunlight; windswept; fragile; canvas; area; wheatfield

Conservation was stressed on the 3rd syllable

Pronunciation: Did you notice that the ‘ture‘ part of capture was pronounced as a ‘ch’ sound?

Punctuation – did you remember to close the speechmarks at the end of both speakers’ words?

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