Painters of the Nagybánya art school visited Izvora, the forester's lodge on the Rozsály Mountain over Nagybánya, with great pleasure. Oszkár Glatz liked going there so much that he even moved there for five months in spring 1897 when he painted a series of oil pictures in plein air style in his great solitude. In summer 1900 and 1901 Iványi Grünwald spent some time there when he painted In the Mountains, a large scale composition with a lot of figures. He portrayed people dressed in splendid traditional Hungarian costumes in plein air unity full of light and air, and he covered them with hundreds of thousands of reflexes from the surroundings.
In the Valley, its variant of smaller size, reflects the same monumental experience of landscape. It can be considered as a predecessor of the large scale version. In the small picture the painter attempted to come to terms mainly with the relationship between structure and several prime colours of the landscape. He portrayed ravishing nature and figures bewitched by and settled down in it, in masses and forms simplified. Prime colours full of sunshine and caught in rich values (green landscape, blue sky and river) are concentrated in symbols.
The colours of the picture make it related to Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse to some extent, but at the same time, Iványi Grünwald's picture goes beyond Szinyei Merse's composition where he solved a problem raised by him in 1873 in a perfect way. The return of the same subject matter in the 20th century indicates a step away from painting images towards post-impressionism.