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Ad Code: 2
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from Auction House Records.
Portrait of Star Road
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Catharine Critcher became the
first and only woman member of the Taos Society of Artists in Taos, New
Mexico, elected in 1924. She was known for her formal portrait
paintings of distinguished easterners and also for portraits of New
Mexico and Arizona Indians. In addition, she did landscape
paintings, florals and figures, and locations in addition to the
Southwest included Mexico, Canada, France, and Massachusetts.
Critcher was raised on her family estate in Audley in Westmoreland
County, and was the daughter of John Critcher, a judge and U.S.
Congressman, and Elizabeth Whiting Critcher.
She studied at Cooper Union School of Design in New York City in 1890,
and the next year at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC.
She then worked for thirteen years as a portrait artist in the DC area,
followed by study in Paris at the Academié Julian and with Richard
Miller and Charles Hoffbauer. In 1911, she exhibited at the Paris
Salon. In Paris in 1905, she founded her own school of art, the
Cours Critcher, where she showed much administrative ability as well as
painting talent. She maintained the school until 1909, when she
returned to the United States.
From 1911 to 1917, she was an instructor at the Corcoran School of Art,
and in 1924 in Washington D.C. with a partner, Clara Hill, founded
another school of art, The Critcher School of Painting and Applied
Arts. Critcher served as Director until 1940 when she decided to
devote herself full time to painting. In 1943, she settled
in Charles Town, West Virginia, and in 1957, moved to a nursing home in
Blackstone, Virginia, where she died in 1964.
In 1922, Catharine
first went to Taos, New Mexico and returned each summer through 1926
and again in 1928. She said . . . "Taos is unlike any place God
ever made. . . . There are models galore and no phones."
(Kovinick 59). She did some notable portrait studies and continued to
return for many summers, and in 1924 was unanimously voted into the
all-male Taos Society of Artists. She is recalled as energetic
and attractive and startling in Washington D.C. because she would
return after her summers in Taos "with a wrinkled, deeply suntanned
skin in the 1920s when that was not fashionable" (Samuels, 115).
From New Mexico, she traveled to Arizona where in 1928, she spent two
months during the summer sketching and painting on the Hopi Indian
Reservation in northern Arizona. Among her painting titles from
that period are Hopi Indian Home and Snake Chief.
Sources include:
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Catharine Critcher is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Taos Pre 1940
Women Artists
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