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James Daugherty (1889–1974) was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1889. He grew up on farms in Ohio and Indiana until age ten, when his family relocated to Washington, D.C. There, with encouragement from his father, James enrolled in night classes at Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (formerly, the Corcoran School of Art). Later, during the summer of 1903, he attended the Darby School of Painting, run by professors at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The following year, when his father relocated to London, James accompanied him and had the opportunity to study art under British artist Frank Brangwyn. He returned to New York at 18, and began his professional career in the arts.

Upon his return from London he took up residence in Brooklyn Heights, and worked as an illustrator for magazines and advertising agencies. In 1913, James married Sonia Medvedeva, and they soon had their son Charles. During World War I, he was employed as a camouflage painter of naval ships and began work as a mural artist. He also received commissions to create posters for U.S. Government agencies, including the U.S. Shipping Board and Department of the Treasury. In his early twenties, he moved his family to Weston, Connecticut, where he began to establish himself as an illustrator for books and magazines. In Connecticut he became a member of two local art organizations, the Darien Guild of the Seven Arts and the Silvermine Guild of Artists.

Daugherty's artistic style was greatly influenced by the 1913 landmark Armory Show in New York. Daugherty joined artists Arthur B. Frost, Jr., Morgan Russell, and Stanton Macdonald Wright in the development of the Synchromist approach (1913–1918), a practice of abstract art that focused on rhythmic color forms.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Daugherty received several major commissions from the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a program under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Daugherty completed five major murals under this program. They are located in the Holmes School in Darien, Connecticut; the Virden, Illinois Post Office; Stamford High School in Connecticut; the Greenwich, Connecticut Town Hall; and the Fairfield Court, a low-income housing development in Stamford, Connecticut.

After the Great War, Daugherty continued working as a prolific children's book author and illustrator, illustrating nearly seventy titles throughout his life. In 1940, he won the Newbery Medal for his book Daniel Boone, which he wrote and illustrated, and was a runner-up for two Caldecott Medals with Andy and the Lion and Gillespie and the Guards. Many of his works highlight the stories of American politicians and folk heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Lewis and Clark. Daugherty, however, was also greatly influenced by and illustrated the works of great American poets such as Walt Whitman (Walt Whitman's America, 1964) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Sound of Trumpets, 1971). He was also a collaborator and illustrator for many children's books authored by his wife Sonia, including The Way of An Eagle (1941) and Ten Brave Women (1953). His son Charles also became a children's book author, and published several titles with Viking Press and Macmillan, many of which were illustrated by James Daugherty.

In 1953, Daugherty returned to abstract color painting, something he continued over the last twenty years of his life. His paintings were exhibited in only a handful of shows from the 1950s through the 1970s. In 2002, the Spanierman Modern gallery in New York presented a solo exhibition of his work titled James Daugherty: Late Abstractions that displayed over thirty-five of his abstract paintings and resulted in a published catalogue of these works. His abstract paintings are held in many public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

James Daugherty died in Boston, Massachusetts on February 21, 1974.