James Daugherty was born in 1889 in Asheville, North Carolina. The early years of his life was spent in Indiana and Ohio. (1) In 1898, his family moved to Washington, D.C., where in 1903 he enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art. In the summer of 1904, he studied with Thomas Anschutz and Hugh Breckenridge at the Darby Summer School of Painting in Pennsylvania. That fall, before going to Europe, he commenced studies for one year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where one of his teachers was William Merritt Chase.

Daugherty took classes in London with the academic painter Frank Brangwyn for two years beginning in 1905. In 1907, he returned to New York, and there he worked for some ti...