McFee studied at Stevenson's Art School in Pittsburg, at the Art Students League summer school in Woodstock, New York, under Birge Harrison (1908), and abroad. He returned to Woodstock to live and worked in post-impressionist and cubist styles, specializing in industrial and urban subjects. These works were exhibited in New York at the McDowell Club. During the 1920s McFee conducted classes with Andrew Dasburg and Charles Rosen in Woodstock. McFee;s later work moved away from abstraction towards a more representational style.
In 1937 McFee moved to San Antonio where he took the position of director of the Museum School of Art. In 1942 he was appointed professor in the graduate school of Claremont College (Claremont, California) and also taught at Scripps College, also in Claremont, California.
McFee did a series of portraits of Negros while spending winters in Virginia (before 1948). In 1986 an exhibition of McFee's still lives was held at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC.
