An only child, Marguerite Thompson Zorach was born in Santa Rosa, CA in 1887. Thompson often experimented with Cubism and Fauvism, as well as different media, including watercolors, oil paintings, and textile art. She was known for her wild paintings and her ability to use many different bold and pure colors in a single work. Unfortunately, Thompson destroyed many of her early paintings, but paintings such as Whippoorwills (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Les Baux, Moonlight (Whitney Museum of American Art) exemplify art from her most prolific period between 1908 and 1920.

Against the odds, Thompson was admitted to Stanford University, but chose not to finish her degree. Instead, in 1907, she travelled to Paris, where she began to study at La Palette, a post-impressionist school. Before Thompson left for Paris, she was a rather traditional artist, but her teachers at La Palette and her friends in the city quickly transformed her style. At the French school, Thompson was instructed by John Duncan Fergusson, a cutting-edge Fauvist and impressionist painter, and Jacques-Emile Blanche, a prosperous portrait painter. She interacted with Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henri Rousseau, and Henri Matisse. Thompson also met her future husband, William Zorach, at La Palette. The two avant-garde artists married in 1912 and returned to the United States, where the pair were a formidable force on the Modernist New York art scene. After the birth of the couple’s second child in 1917, Thompson shifted away from painting and towards weaving tapestries, which often possessed similar stylistic characteristics to those of her paintings. Her textiles were popular among the public, but were not as celebrated by art critics. In old age, Marguerite Thompson Zorach suffered from macular degeneration and she was forced to turn back to painting until her death in 1968. Although she was never as popular as her husband, Marguerite Thompson’s stylistic freedom sets her apart from many other contemporaneous artists.