Catharine Carter Critcher

Catharine (sometimes Catherine) Carter Critcher (September 13, 1868 – June 11, 1964) was an American painter. A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body. She was a long time member of the Arts Club of Washington.

Biography Critcher was the daughter of Judge John Critcher and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Thomasia Kennon (Whiting) Critcher; she was their fourth daughter and the youngest of their five children. She grew up on the family plantation, Audley, in Oak Grove, Virginia, and showed an early interest in equestrianism and painting.

Critcher's first studies came at the Arlington Institute in Virginia. She then studied at Cooper Union in New York City for a year, with Eliphalet Frazer Andrews at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and also with Richard Emil Miller She soon began receiving commissions, producing a number of portraits of members of prominent Virginia families. In 1897 she was occupying studio space in the former Minor house in Alexandria, located on North Alfred Street. She traveled to Paris in 1904, remaining in that city for several years. In 1919 she founded another school, this time in Washington, called variously The School of Painting and Applied Arts She ran the school until 1940, when she decided to devote herself to painting full-time. During the 1910s and 1920s she lived at The Woodley in Washington. this is also given as the first address of her school, which later moved to a location along Connecticut Avenue. Among the institution's pupils was Sarah Blakeslee, whom Critcher encouraged to enroll in the Chester Springs branch of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts upon graduation from high school. Critcher was assisted in running the school by her sister Louisa Kennon Critcher, known as "Lulie", who was also an artist. The honor brought her great pleasure; she wrote to her friend, C. Powell Minnigerode, "You will be pleased, I know, to hear that a letter just rec’d from Mr. Couse informs me that I have been unanimously elected to active membership in the Taos Society of Artists. It is nice to be the first and only woman in it. I am feeling very good about it." Unlike many members of the Taos Society, Critcher never lived in New Mexico permanently, choosing to summer there instead for several years; it was said of her that she would return to Washington "with a wrinkled, deeply suntanned skin in the 1920s when that was not fashionable". In the 1940s and 1950s she lived in Charles Town, West Virginia, completing at least forty-two portraits during her residence there.

Work Critcher's early academic style has been described as "dark but pleasing", but it later developed into something powerfully expressive, with a vivid sense of color; in this regard it was greatly similar to the work of other Taos Society painters. She has been called "a respected artist in the European avant-garde", with an interest in symbolism and abstraction; in this regard, some of her work prefigures that of Georgia O'Keeffe. Exhibits of her art were held in 1928, at the Women's University Club of Washington, D.C.; in 1938, at the Studio Guild of New York; in 1940 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and in 1949 at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland. the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Maryland Institute, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago; she also exhibited in the Greater Washington Independent Exhibition of 1935.

Critcher received a handful of awards for her work, including a bronze medal from the Cooper Union and a gold medal from the Corcoran School, and an honorable mention at the Académie Julian. this painting was later included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987. Other notables who sat for her over the years include Senator Harry F. Byrd and twenty generals, among them George Marshall and Mark W. Clark.

One of Critcher's Taos paintings, Indian Women Making Pottery (c. 1924), is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her pieces may also be found in the collections of the San Antonio Art League, the Museum of the Southwest, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Her painting The Young Hunter is owned by the Taos Art Museum, while Portrait of Star Road is part of the Haub Family Collection of Western American Art at the Tacoma Art Museum. The artist herself donated an oil painting of Zinnias to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1926. A portrait of John Mosby dating to before 1901 is owned by the University of Virginia, while a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, dating to 1939 and based on a work by George Peter Alexander Healy, is held by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Other paintings remain in private hands. In 1927 Critcher produced a copy of a portrait of George Wythe which she presented for display in the George Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg.