Teaching Activity: Verbal and Visual Matching

intermediate
LA

Match these quotations from Van Gogh's letters with the paintings or preparatory drawings to which they refer.

July 1888

"It took me a whole week...but I had to reserve my mental energy to do [it] well....a Japanese girl -- Provençal in this case -- twelve to fourteen years old."
answer

Fall 1889

"I am struggling to catch them. They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange....Very difficult."
answer

September or October 1888

"The broad lines of the furniture again must express inviolable rest. Portraits on the walls, and a mirror and a towel and some clothes...This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged to take."
answer

September 1888

"It's terrific, these houses, yellow in the sun, and the incomparable freshness of the blue....The house on the left is pink with green shutters....This is the restaurant where I go for dinner every day. My friend the postman lives at the end of the street on the left."
answer

Two letters from late summer or fall 1882

"All during the week we have had a great deal of wind, storm and rain, and I went to Scheveningen several times to see it."

"The sea was the color of dirty soapsuds."
answer

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