Around 1917, Zorach followed the lead of Pablo Picasso and began experimenting with wood and stone carvings. By 1922, he devoted himself entirely to sculpture, and like Picasso, became fascinated in “primitive art”—the ritual objects and sculpture pieces of Oceanic, Native American and African tribes. Zorach’s work developed in its use of block-like forms with progressive suppression of detail—drawing elements from sources as disparate as the contemporary cubist and modernist movements, and combining them with forms seen in early African sculpture. Though the forms of his sculpture were often abstract, Zorach primarily focused upon a traditional subject matter, producing such well-known sculptures as Young Girl, now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Mother and Child, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, William Zorach is known as one of the earliest and most influential American artists dedicated to direct carving. Zorach also made an impression as a teacher and writer, facilitating a major change in the aesthetic philosophy and technique of sculpture in the United States.

During the summers from 1913 to 1922, Zorach and his wife Marguerite painted mostly in the country, and also while vacationing in the mountains of New Hampshire, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Yosemite National Park. Both artists used these excursions to collaborate and experiment with new media, often using the various landscapes as inspiration. Of his works in watercolor, Zorach once said, “there are things one does for the pure love of form and color, in the easy abandonment to the moods and the fancies of the moment. These are my watercolors.” In the Sierras was painted on one of these summer excursions, in a style vastly different from Zorach’s other watercolors. Here, the figure of the mountain is blurry and nearly abstract, taking the form of an enormous, prismatic flame rising up out of the grass. Colors float and meld into each other on either side of the bright middle, painted in loose, visible brushstrokes, while Zorach retains an element of cubism by structuring the composition as a series of rounded triangles. The mixing and layering of watercolors adds a sense of excitement to the work, as if light reflecting off the mountains is injecting color into the otherwise bland landscape.