In the years following the Civil War, John La Farge sought to forge a style of landscape painting that broke from the then-dominant aesthetic of the Hudson River School. Rather than use a carefully arranged view to convey the splendor of the natural world, as was favored by artists of this school, La Farge instead sought to demonstrate that painting directly from nature – what he called "copying nature" – could produce successful landscapes. The Last Valley—Paradise Rocks is not only one of the key works of that endeavor but one of the greatest achievements of 19th-century American landscape painting. La Farge himself considered it a culminating moment of his early years as a painter and one of the most important paintings of his entire career.
For The Last Valley, La Farge set up a temporary studio on a high vantage point in the Paradise Hills near Newport, Rhode Island, overlooking Bishop Berkeley's Rock. The view plunges dramatically into space, with the ridges flanking the valley alternately bathed in the light of sunset and cloaked in shadow. La Farge carefully controlled his handling of paint, varying freely brushed passages of the immediate foreground with tighter, more geologically structured passages of the rock face of the ridge at left. As a result, The Last Valley has both a vibrant immediacy and a grandly solemn monumentality in its evocation of the timeless beauty of the natural world.
La Farge painted the work during the period 1867–1868 following a serious illness that left him unable to work for several months. Hoping to revive his career, he turned his attention to large landscapes suitable for public exhibitions. As with his earlier small landscapes, he painted almost entirely outdoors. Given the time the #plein air# process entailed, La Farge ultimately completed only two of these large-scale paintings: The Last Valley—Paradise Rocks, and the slightly earlier Paradise Valley (Chicago, Terra Foundation for American Art).
Over the course of his long and successful career, La Farge produced inventive work in an unrivaled variety of media including oil, watercolor, encaustic, and stained glass, and received several important mural commissions for churches, government buildings, and private homes.