Marguerite Thompson Zorach was born in Santa Rosa, California in 1887 and grew up in Fresno. Zorach started to draw at a very young age and her parents provided her with an education heavily influenced by the liberal arts. She was admitted to Stanford University in 1908, one of a small group of women allowed to attend. When invited to travel to Paris with her aunt, Zorach dropped out of Stanford and embarked on a stay in Paris followed by a lengthy tour of the world in 1911 and 1912. During this time abroad, she socialized with Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henri Rousseau and Henri Matisse. She visited Jerusalem, Egypt, India, Burma, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Hawaii. This trip had a huge effect on her art, leading to her attending the progressive Académie de La Palette, where she was an early experimenter of fauvism and cubism and where she also met her husband, William Zorach, whom she married in 1912. Marguerite and William collaborated artistically and both exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913.

Zorach continued to be a prolific artist throughout her life, serving as the president of the modernist New York Society of Women Artists in the mid-1920s and working for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, a federally funded program that employed artists to create art for the public. She experimented with textile art and distinguished herself as an outstanding designer of embroidered tapestries.

This piece, Farther, makes use of the cubist lessons Zorach learned in Europe by fracturing the picture plane into different figurative elements.