The child of Scottish-born parents, Grant was sent "home" for his education. The four month long sea voyage to Scotland, taken when he was thirteen, may well have been a contributing factor to the focus of his future career. After graduation from Fife Academy in Kircaldy, Grant studied at Heatherley's and Lambeth schools in London. He then returned to San Francisco in 1895, and a position as staff artist with the San Francisco Examiner. The following year he went to New York where he worked for the World and the Journal newspapers. At the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, Grant was sent to South Africa by Harper's Weekly. On his return he settled to a position as a staff artist for Puck from 1901 to 1909. Having joined the seventh regiment of the New York National Guard in 1907, he saw active service in the Mexican border incident of 1916.
Grant primary medium was etching, and it was in the graphic artist classification that he was elected to the Academy, but he also was an accomplished watercolorist. In both media, his characteristic subject matter was ships at sea, ship portraits, fishermen, and the character types fund along waterfronts. His summer residences reflected this life-long attachment to the sea: Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Gloucester and Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and frequently in the 1920s, around Ogunquit, Maine.
Books Grant authored as well as illustrated were: Sail-Ho, a sketchbook of life on sailing ships; Greasy Luck, a whaling sketchook, published in 1932; Ships Under Sail; and The Secret Voyage. The sketches for Sail-Ho were made during a 1925 voyage on an old windjammer Star of Alaska to Chignik on the Aleutian peninsula. Grant also illustrated The Book of Old Ships and Forty Famous Ships by J. B. Culver.
Grant's watercolors were exbibited regularly at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. Among his prizes were the Shaw Prize from the Salmagundi Club in both 1931 and 1936; Prize for Etching, Chicago Society of Etchers, 1937; silver medal for etching, Paris Exposition, 1937; and from the American Watercolor Society, the Ryder Memorial Prize, 1952, and the Fredericks Prize, 1955.
A participant in the Federal Arts Projects of the depressin era, Grant executed the murals El Indio, El Gringo and El Paysano for the Alhambra, California, post office in 1938; Agriculture and Industries of Ventura for the Ventura, California, post office, also in 1938; and Texas Immigrants for the Brady, Texas, post office in 1939.
Grant was elected to a three-year term on the Academy Council in 1950.
