McCarter worked as an illustrator in New York before becoming an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for forty years.

"[1] In 1887, he went to Paris where he studied with Puvis de Chavannes, Léon Bonnat and Thomas Alexander Harrison of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

In 1902 he accepted a position as a watercolor teacher[4] and the first instructor of illustration at his former school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

[1] According to the art curator W. Douglass Paschal, McCarter "sought a path merging the compositional structures, brushwork and strong coloration of the Post-Impressionists and Fauves he admired.

[1] Students who McCarter influenced included Franklin C. Watkins,[5] Charles Demuth, Norman Carton, and Arthur B.