Milton Avery was born in Sand Bank, New York, today known as Altmar, on March 7, 1893. The son of a tanner, Avery began working at a local factory at the age of 16, and supported himself for decades with a succession of blue-collar jobs. The death of his brother-in-law in 1915 left Avery as the sole remaining adult male in his household, therefore responsible for supporting his nine female relatives.

His interest in art led him to attend classes at the Connecticut League of Art College in Hartford, and over a period of years he painted in obscurity while receiving a basic art education. In 1917 he began working night jobs in order to paint in the daytime and continue his studies. Avery worked in manufacturing and with an insurance company until 1924. He moved to New York a year later in 1925 where he met an artist/illustrator named Sally Michel. They were married in 1926 and her income as an illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting.

For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. He had his first solo exhibition as early as 1928 at the Opportunity Gallery in New York and the decades that followed saw him show work at numerous exhibitions mounted by New York galleries and American museums.

Roy Neuberger, an American financier, saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery's work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With the work of Milton Avery rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.

Avery continued to paint prolifically and soon developed a preoccupation with French Fauvism and German Expressionism, which led him to develop a simplified formal style distinguished by clarity of line and an expressive colour palette. Whereas Avery's early figurative drawings and paintings from the 1930s attest to affinities primarily with the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, by the 1940s he was discernibly closer to Henri Matisse.

Avery developed the French artist's decorative colour surfaces into subtly toned colour zones, thus breaking the ground for the Colour Field painting of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom were friends of his. Even though his style was close to abstraction, Avery nonetheless clung to representation throughout his entire career.

Classical motifs and subject matter such as portraits, still life’s and coastal landscapes were his main themes. Prolific as both a painter and graphic artist, Avery received numerous awards from American art institutions. Avery was a man of few words. "Why talk when you can paint?" he often quipped. He died in 1965 and was buried in Artists Cemetery, Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.