While Sonntag produced highly acclaimed paintings of Italy, which he visited with Robert S. Duncanson, it was his scenes from the American wilderness, especially Virginia, that secured his reputation as a master of color and light. This idyllic landscape, likely based on sketches made during a trip to the Shenandoah Valley in 1859/60, was painted in 1864, the year Union armies marched through the region in a destructive “scorched earth” campaign. The painting, exhibited the same year at the National Academy of Design in New York, would have resonated with a war-weary public accustomed to regarding Virginia as the front lines of the ongoing Civil War.