Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin. As a young man he went to Chicago and worked as an illustrator by day, attending the Chicago Art Institute by night. In 1911 Tobey moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCaIl's magazine.

His first one-man show was held at M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1917. He took up portrait painting, but gave it up after a time, and instead turned to decorating lamps and screens.

In 1918 Tobey converted to the Bahà'i World Faith which led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art. Four years later he moved to Seattle and began teaching at the Cornish School of Allied Arts. Also that year he began to explore Chinese calligraphy. In 1923, he went to Seattle to teach art and continued painting in his early, semi-realistic style.

The artist went to Paris in 1925, beginning his lifelong travels. While in the Middle East in 1926, he became interested in Persian and Arabic script. Upon returning to Seattle in 1928, Tobey confounded the Free and Creative Art School. From 1931 to 1938 he was resident artist at Dartington Hall, a progressive school in Devonshire, England, and there he met such intellectual leaders as Aldous Huxley and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian mystic.

His tenure there was punctuated with frequent absences for travel to Mexico, the United States and the Orient. Tobey spent a month in a Zen monastery outside Kyoto in 1934; the following year he began his "white writing" paintings, which were shown for the first time at the Willard Gallery, New York, in 1944. Tobey exhibited regularly at the Willard Gallery thereafter.

Tobey returned in 1938 to Seattle where, in addition to painting and teaching, he studied the piano and music theory. During this period he executed several paintings inspired by Seattle's open-air market. The Arts Club of Chicago held one-man shows of Tobey's work in 1940 and 1946.

Tobey was by then living with Pehr Hallsten, whom he said he had met in 1940 when he enrolled in a French course at the Ballard Y.M.C.A. Alternatively, their meeting has been reported as having occurred when Pehr, a one-time worker for the Seattle Parks Department, was picking up trash with a stick at a local park. Both encounters may be true. In any case, they soon were inseparable. "Many friends think it's a homosexual relationship but it's not. He came and I need someone helpless to take care of. That is what my nature requires," Tobey said.

He was given a solo exhibition in 1945 at the Portland Museum of An, Oregon. In 1951, at the invitation of Albers, Tobey spent three months as guest critic of graduate art-students' work at Yale University. Also that year the artist's first retrospective was held, at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. A one-man show of Tobey's work took place in 1955 at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris.

The next year he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and he received a Guggenheim International Award. In 1957 he began his Sumi ink paintings. Tobey was awarded the City of Venice painting prize at the Venice Biennale the following year.

The artist settled in Basel in 1960, and in 1961 he became the first American painter to be honored with a one-man exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Solo presentations of Tobey's work were held at The Museum of Modem Art, New York, in 1962, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1966. A major retrospective of the artist's work took place at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC, in 1974. Tobey died in Basel.