Scholars of American visual culture can no longer complain that John La Farge's appreciation is incomplete, or that the value of his production has been only partially assessed. After a series of major events, in fact, his achievements in many fields (painting, writing, illustration, arts and crafts technique, stained glass windows) have lost the marginality to which they were confined, following the decline of his fame, from the late 1930s through the early 1970s. Before that decline, La Farge's significance for American art had been best summed up by Lewis Mumford:

Around the end of the twentieth century, a sure evidence of a John La Farge revival was the splendid exhibition organised as a joint venture by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Its long-lasting output was the thoroughly informed and richly illustrated volume John La Farge, which published dense texts by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren and James L. Yarnall. Within the context of its public programs, and in association with the Lowell Institute, during the following year the Boston Museum of Fine Arts sponsored six lectures on virtually all aspects of the artist's activity. The list of speakers included H. Barbara Weinberg, Lauretta Dimmick, Henry Adams, James L. Yarnall and Sean M. McNally

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the publication of a great number of essays on La Farge's prismatic personality. Suffice here to mention James L. Yarnall's John La Farge: A Biographical and Critical Study (2012) and the comprehensive monograph by Katie Kresser, The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America (2013).