[1] McCarthy lived for almost his entire life in the small town of Weatherly, Pennsylvania, where his family was well established (a patrician background uncommon among self-taught artists).
McCarthy then turned to art as a therapeutic outlet from the menial work he was limited to by his precarious mental health.
[2][4] This interest in popular culture was not uncommon among American artists in the 1920s: both Stuart Davis and Gerard Murphy incorporated the visual argot of advertising into a bright Cubist syntax.
[5] Unlike these proto-Pop artists, however, McCarthy's style is expressionist, with a highly gestural and textured appearance that readily calls to mind works by European masters such as Emil Nolde and Chaïm Soutine.
(The most significant early "discoverer" and promoter of McCarthy's art, Sterling Strauser, characterized his style as "naive expressionist.