An erudite man and a world traveler, Dougherty sketched and exhibited extensively on both the east and west coasts of the United States, in the British Isles, throughout Europe and in Asia.

Dougherty won almost every major award at the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design in New York, as well as a Gold Medal at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

He was the eldest of six children born to J. Hampden Dougherty, a prominent attorney, legal scholar and leader of the New York State Bar Association.

In filling out an information card for the National Academy, he stated that he studied with the noted landscape painter Henry Ward Ranger in 1897, which is the only formal training he mentioned.

Soon after returning to the United States, Dougherty began to work on Monhegan Island, Maine, an area which was already a famous summer place for painters.

In Maine, the young painter began to build his first significant body of the marine paintings he would become known for and the dramatic views of the Island offered him a host of subjects.

He joined the Society of American Artists in 1904, a group of younger painters who had broken away from the National Academy years before because it was then dominated by the aging members of the Hudson River School.

Macbeth and Dougherty forged a lasting friendship and the young painter began a long series of successful exhibitions in the 5th Avenue Gallery.

While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) did a pencil sketch of St. Ives as early as 1811, it wasn't until the completion of a rail line to Penzance in 1859, that artists began to frequent the area and paint its dramatic views.

The San Francisco world's fair featured a massive exhibition of paintings from the history of art as well as hundreds of works by contemporary artists from the United States and Europe.

In his guide to the exhibition, the writer Michael Williams stated that "Another marine artist whose work is well and favorably known and which has been awarded a Gold Medal, is Paul Dougherty.

Four pictures by him hang on Wall A. Paul Dougherty is a New York man, of such independence of mind that he studied without any masters in Paris, London, Florence, Venice and Munich.

Dougherty was in such demand that a 1916 issue of the Bulletin for the Detroit Museum of Art mentioned him among the American artists who had "reached the zenith of their power" whose works they were seeking for their permanent collection.

That December, his watercolors were the subject of an exhibition at Macbeth Gallery and in a review, the writer for the New York Times complimented Dougherty's progress by saying that "in his oil pictures has worked during the last ten years with a steadily increasing appreciation of chromatic values, is showing at the Macbeth Galleries a group of water colors that challenge comparison with the best of their kind."

He forged a national artistic reputation early in his life and his works sold steadily until the modern movements eventually supplanted traditional art in the 1930s.

In 1978 the art historian Mahonri Sharp Young wrote of him that "Everything came to him; all his pictures sold, he won all the prizes...the rich delighted to honor him, and his wives were glamorous."

Like Homer, Dougherty liked to depict churning, turbulent waters, exemplified in canvasses such as Grey Sea, a work that demonstrates his favorite compositional scheme - an outcropping of rocks pounded by the rough surf in the foreground, a high horizon line, and an expansive of cloud streaked sky.

As in the majority of his coastal scenes, Dougherty avoids allusions to man, architecture or boats, preferring to concentrate on the tumultuous motion of the sea and the glimmer of light on the wave crests and the rocky shore - denoted here by means of an energetic brushwork and a palette of blues, mauves, greens and browns with a pale yellow, gray and white.

Paul Dougherty's works were exhibited in a number of leading commercial galleries in his lifetime, but then primarily on the east coast of the United States.