Catharine Carter Critcher

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 and Charles Hoffbauer. She soon began receiving commissions, producing a number of portraits of members of prominent Virginia families. She traveled to Paris in 1904, remaining in that city for several years. Initially she enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she studied under Charles Hoffbauer and Jean-Paul Laurens; her time there was made difficult due to troubles with the French language. She founded the Cours Critcher in 1905 in an attempt to aid American artists in gaining admission to French schools, an enterprise in which she had the assistance of Miller and Hoffbauer. Mindful of her previous linguistic troubles, she designed a school where instruction was offered in English. To make extra money she acted as a tour guide for Americans visiting Europe during the summer months. Critcher exhibited at the Paris Salon during her time in the city, and served as president of the American Women Painters in Paris.

In 1909 Critcher returned to the United States and taught at her alma mater, the Corcoran, remaining there until 1919. In that year she founded another school, this time in Washington, called variously The School of Painting and Applied Arts or the Critcher School. This she ran until 1940, when she decided to devote herself to painting full-time. In 1922 she began teaching with sculptor Clara Hill. During the 1930s she ran the Red Rock Cove Art Camp on property which she rented near Saltville, Virginia. During the 1910s and 1920s she lived at The Woodley in Washington. Her studio was located on St. Matthew's Court. Among Critcher's pupils at her Washington school was Sarah Blakeslee, whom she encouraged to enroll in the Chester Springs branch of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts upon graduation from high school.

Critcher paid her first visit to Taos, New Mexico in 1920, and would return for many summers. She was quite taken with the town, saying, "no place could be more conducive of work. There are models galore and no phones." In 1924 the all-male Taos Society of Artists unanimously voted her in as a member. 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". She traveled widely in search of subjects, visiting the Laurentian Mountains of Canada, Mexico, and Gloucester, Massachusetts; she spent several summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was a member of the local art association. She spent two months on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona in 1928. In the 1940s and 1950s she lived in Charles Town, West Virginia, completing at least forty-two portraits during her residence there.

Critcher never married, although she was courted by a number of men including John Mosby. Late in her career, her health began to fail, and she moved to Norfolk, Virginia, to live with a niece before dying in a nursing home in Blackstone, Virginia. She is buried beside her parents and sister Louisa in the family plot at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia, where her name is misspelled as "Catherine" on the grave marker.

Work

Critcher's early academic style has been described as "dark but pleasing", but it later became powerfully expressive, with a vivid sense of color, elements which it shared with the work of many of the other Taos painters. 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. She was a member of numerous organizations, including the Society of Washington Artists, the Southern States Art League, and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.

Crichter painted a large number of portraits during her career, working in a traditional and realistic style. Two of these, those of James Leal Greenleaf and Oscar E. Berninghaus, are in the collection of the National Academy of Design. Princeton University owns her portrait of Woodrow Wilson. 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. In April, 1896 she presented for exhibition a portrait of her father at the Essex County Courthouse in Tappahannock; this was hanging in the Westmoreland County Courthouse in Montross in 1934.

One of Critcher's Taos paintings – Indian Women Making Pottery of c. 1924, donated by Adolph Gottlieb – is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her pieces may also be found in the collections of the San Antonio Art League, the New Mexico Museum of Art, 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. Critcher received a handful of awards during her career, including a bronze medal from the Cooper Union and a gold medal from the Corcoran School, and an honorable mention at the Académie Julian.

Critcher's painting Taos Farmers, of c. 1929, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987.