please grade my integrated essay...

The reading passage states that it is doubtful whether Portrait of a n Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet was created by Rembrandt. The lecturer affirms that research studies have shown that it is one of the masterpieces by Rembrandt and illustrates her viewpoint providing reasons.
To begin with, according to the article there was a contradictions between the way woman was dressed and her social statues, as the woman is considered to be a servant but at the same time the painter used luxurious fur collar to depict her coat. However, the professor asserts that one hundred years after the original painting was created the masterpiece was colored, as they thought that fur color will look more aristrocrate and will look more fascinating.
In addition, the reading passage says Rembrandt will not use the combination of light and shadow in such an illiterate way. In contrast the professor posits that in the original painting the master used the simple light colors that will illuminate the face of the woman. She says that in the original masterpiece shadow and light were more realistic.
Finally, the passage says that it was painted on a panel of several pieces of wood that Rembrandt never did before in his other masterpieces. On the contrary, the professor states that the original was painted on a single panel but later there were used several pieces of wood glued together. Moreover, research studies shows that the pieces were made of the same tree.

TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation between two students at their university cafeteria

Hi, here are the reading and lecture. I thought you did a pretty good job with this. Your structure is good, but you have a few errors in your sentence construction and you missed a couple of secondary points. Overall, I would rate this a 4.5 out of 5

#1 (permalink) Thu Aug 15, 2013 16:31 pm Hi, Luschen, this is my third integrated essay.
The reading material:
Rembrandt is the most famous of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters. However, there are doubts whether some paintings attributed to Rembrandt were actually painted by him. One such painting is known as attributed to Rembrandt because of its style, and indeed the representation of the woman’s face is very much like that of portraits known to be by Rembrandt. But there are problems with the painting that suggest it could not be a work by Rembrandt.
First, there is something inconsistent about the way the woman in the portrait is dressed. She is wearing a white linen cap of a kind that only servants would wear-yet the coat she is wearing has a luxurious fur collar that no servant could afford. Rembrandt, who was known for his attention to the details of his subjects’ clothing, would not have been guilty of such an inconsistency.
Second, Rembrandt was a master of painting light and shadow, but in this painting these elements do not fit together. The face appears to be illuminated by light reflected onto it from below. But below the face is the dark fur collar, which would absorb light rather than reflect it. So the face should appear partially in shadow-which is not how it appears. Rembrandt would never have made such an error.
Finally, examination of the back of the painting reveals that it was painted on a panel made of several pieces of wood glued together. Although Rembrandt often painted on wood panels, no painting known to be by Rembrandt uses a panel glued together in this way from several pieces of wood.

The listening material:
Everything you just read about “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet” is true, and yet after a thorough re-examination of the painting, a panel of experts has recently concluded that it’s indeed a work by Rembrandt. Here is why.
First, the fur collar. X-rays and analysis of the pigments in the paint have shown that the fur collar wasn’t part of the original painting. The fur collar was painted over the top of the original painting about a hundred years after the painting was made. Why? Someone probably wanted to increase the value of the painting by making it look like a formal portrait of an aristocratic lady.
Second, the supposed error with light and shadow. Once the paint of the added fur color was removed, the original painting could be seen. In the original painting, the woman is wearing a simple collar of light-colored cloth. The light-colored cloth of this collar reflects light that illuminated part of the woman’s face. That’s why the face is not in partial shadow. So in the original painting, light and shadow are very realistic and just what we could expect from Rembrandt.
Finally, the wood panel. It turns out that when the fur collar was added, the wood panel was also enlarged with extra wood pieces glued to the sides and the top to make the painting more grand and more valuable. So the original painting is actually painted on a single piece of wood, as would be expected from a Rembrandt painting. And in fact, researchers have found that the piece of wood in the original form of “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet” is from the very same tree as the wood panel used for another painting by Rembrandt, his “Self-portrait with a Hat”.