James Deering (November 12, 1859 – September 21, 1925) was an American executive in the management of his family's Deering Harvester Company and later International Harvester, as well as a socialite and an antiquities collector. He built his landmark Vizcaya estate, where he was an early 20th-century resident on Biscayne Bay in the present day Coconut Grove district of Miami, Florida. Begun in 1910, with architecture and gardens in a Mediterranean Revival style, Vizcaya was his passionate endeavor with artist Paul Chalfin, and his winter home from 1916 to his death in 1925.

James Deering was born in 1859 in the western Maine town of South Paris. He was the son of William Deering and his second wife, Clara Barbour Cummings Hamilton Deering. His older half-brother was the arts patron Charles Deering.

His father, who had inherited the family woolen mill and owned large tracts of land in the Northeast, invested in a farm-equipment manufacturing company that he renamed the Deering Harvester Company. In 1873, he moved the family to Chicago, Illinois. The Deering Harvester Company's reaper machinery enabled farmers in the US Midwest to harvest an acre of grain per hour, an increase in productivity sufficient to enhance the profitability of Midwest agriculture significantly. The Deering Harvester Company grew in value, so that by the end of the 19th century the Deerings had become one of America's wealthiest families, and William Deering, James's father, was frugal in managing the family's spending, but did acquire a residence in newly fashionable St. Augustine, Florida, for the winter season. James Deering's older brother Charles joined the family business in the 1880s, after attending the United States Naval Academy and serving nine years in the Navy. James Deering attended Northwestern University for a year and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for another year before joining the company at the same time as Charles.

James joined the Deering Harvester Company in 1880 as treasurer. In 1902, J.P. Morgan and Company purchased Deering Harvester and McCormick Reaper Company and merged them to form the International Harvester Corporation, the largest producer of agricultural machinery in the U.S. Deering became vice-president of the new corporation, responsible for the three Illinois manufacturing plants. In 1909, he was phased out of daily company affairs by J.P. Morgan interests.

By the turn of the century, Deering owned homes on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, in the countryside near Evanston, Illinois, in New York City, and in Paris. His name appeared in social columns as an arts connoisseur, socialite, international traveler, and cultural ambassador. He hosted events for French dignitaries at his New York and Chicago residences. In 1906, for Deering's work in promoting agricultural technology development in France, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur ("National Order of the Legion of Honour").

In 1910, he purchased land for a complex of buildings and gardens in Coconut Grove, south of Miami and north of his brother's estate. He and Paul Chalfin then travelled through Europe purchasing furnishings and architectural elements to be incorporated into Deering's new home, which he named "Vizcaya", the name of a Spanish province rendered in English as "Biscay".

James Deering built Villa Vizcaya between 1914 and 1922 with visionary mastermind of the project, designer Paul Chalfin, his collaborator companion. The architect was F. Burrall Hoffman Jr. The estate's landscape master plan and formal gardens were designed by Colombian landscape designer Diego Suarez. Paul Chalfin had attended Harvard, trained as a painter at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was an associate of renowned decorator Elsie de Wolfe. She introduced Chalfin to Deering for the interiors of his Chicago home in 1910. Chalfin and Deering traveled through Europe together later in 1910 for the first trip of many over the years, in part to collect ideas and begin acquiring art, antiquities, and furnishings for the new Florida estate. Villa Vizcaya is the culmination of their shared effort and a lasting memorial to their creative relationship.

The Villa Vizcaya is distinguished for its Italian Renaissance-inspired Mediterranean Revival architecture, its huge Italian Renaissance revival gardens, and sumptuously designed, detailed, and executed interior architectural elements with European, Asian, and American furnishings, and art and antiquities that span two millennia. The numerous sculptures in the gardens and villa are of ancient Greek, Greco-Roman, and Italian Renaissance origins and styles.