James Royer Flora (January 25, 1914 ‒ July 9, 1998) was an American artist best known for his distinctive and idiosyncratic album cover art for RCA Victor and Columbia Records during the 1940s and 1950s.

They launched The Little Man Press, a letterpress series of limited edition publications, for which Flora supplied illustrations, design, and layout, and on which they collaborated until 1942.

That year, he launched Columbia's monthly new release booklet, Coda,[2] which he continued illustrating and designing through 1945, when he was promoted to advertising manager.

He drove to Mexico with his family; they remained south of the border for 15 months, during which time Jim and Jane painted, created woodcuts, and lived as bohemian gringos in Taxco.

The Floras returned to Connecticut in 1951, and he embarked on a freelance commercial art career, illustrating covers and articles for dozens of mainstream magazines including Fortune, Holiday, Life, Look, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle, Charm, Research and Engineering, Computer Design, Sports Illustrated, Collier's and Pic.

In March 1953, Jones became art director at RCA Victor Records, where he soon began giving album cover assignments to his friend Flora.

This resulted in a Golden Age of Flora LP covers, including such celebrated designs as Mambo For Cats, Inside Sauter-Finegan, Lord Buckley's Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, and Shorty Rogers Courts the Count.

Despite a later reputation for "cuddly" kiddie lit and family-friendly illustrations for mainstream magazines, his fine art—both early and late—was by turns bizarre, playful, comic, erotic and/or macabre.

His style evolved radically over the decades; comparing his sharp, edgy commercial work of the 1940s to his middlebrow buffoonery of the 1970s sometimes leaves the impression they were done by different artists with the same name.

[citation needed] His independently produced fine art, however, remained highly personally expressive, with much of it including images of violence and sexual excess.

(The cover of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora is adorned with figures from his 1940s absurdist burlesque painting The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter.)

Many of his smaller temperas and pen-and-ink sketches, particularly from the 1940s through the 1960s, featured clusters of unrelated images, including bizarre and disturbing figures, interlocking like rune-shaped brickwork.

Flora also established a reputation in the 1980s for large canvases with nautical themes, particularly ocean liners and cruise ships—the decks sometimes populated with tiny figures engaged in pornographic behavior.

Despite his reputation for humorous themes and penchant for caricature, and the undeniable influence of cartoon art on his work, Flora never created comics.