Haarlem linen had a great reputation in the seventeenth century and the linen industry was enormously important to the city's economy. Clothing and uncut cloth were bleached in the fields around the city in a process that took several months. Jacob van Ruisdael, one of the most important seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters, completed about fifteen views of Haarlem showing the linen-bleaching fields. In this richly textured canvas, as in other landscapes of the subject, the artist arranges the buildings and rows of linen to lead the eye diagonally through alternating areas of shadow and light. On the horizon is Saint Bavo's, a famous church flanked to the east and west by bell towers, where Ruisdael was buried in 1682.