View of the Plain of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds

For about 150 years this small view of Haarlem belonged to one English banking family. In 1851 the London dealers John and Samuel Smith bought the whole collection of the Earl of Beverley in a single deal, and that year the picture probably passed from them to Thomas Baring, a partner in the family bank, Baring Brothers, and a serious collector of Dutch painting. After his death it went to his nephew Thomas George Baring, later Earl of Northbrook and viceroy of India. A printed catalogue of the Northbrook pictures listed it in 1889, and the family kept it until 2002.

Ruisdael painted it in the early 1660s, on a canvas about 36 centimetres high. Haarlem lies at the far right of the horizon under a sky that takes up most of the picture, and in the fields below, among long white strips of linen laid out to bleach, small figures are at work. In 2002 the Boston collectors Susan and Matthew Weatherbie bought the painting from the Northbrook family. It is their promised gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, made in support of the museum's Center for Netherlandish Art.