Catharine carter critcher biography

Catharine Carter Critcher Museum Collections

Catharine Critcher was born into a wealthy Westmoreland County, Virginia family. She studied art at the Copper Union School in New York and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C before leaving for Paris to study at the Academie Julian. After the Academie, Critcher founded an art school of her own, the Cours Critcher Painting School, in Paris before returning to the United States and teaching at the Corcoran School. After six years at the Corcoran, Critcher again founded her own art school, this time called The Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts. In 1920, Critcher made her first trip to Taos, New Mexico, with which she became almost immediately infatuated. “Taos is unlike any place God ever made, I believe, and therein is its charm and no place could be more conducive to work; there are models galore and no phones, the artists all live in these attractive funny little adobe houses away from the world, food, foes and friends.” She became the first and only woman to be inducted into the Taos Society of Artists and was unanimously approved by the group.

10 Mar Perspective: A Force of Nature

By the time Catharine Carter Critcher set off on her own for Taos, New Mexico in 1920, she was 52 and had been making her living from art for almost three decades. She had spent five years in Paris, started an art school there and another in Washington, D.C., and was a well-established portrait painter on the East Coast. What she experienced in the Southwest was new and fascinating to her. But unlike many artists in Taos at the time, including members of the Taos Society of Artists, she wasn’t interested in painting the grand, romantic narrative. She didn’t produce large canvases with mountains towering above Taos Pueblo’s ancient adobe structures or Pueblo men wrapped in colorful blankets.

Instead, she did what she had always done. She stood at her easel in front of an individual or small family group and painted the essence of her sitters as she perceived them.

By her fourth summer in Taos, she had become known to the Taos Society of Artists, and in a clear indication of their respect for her work, they unanimously voted her into the group as its only female member in 1924. It was an honor that pleased Critcher, who wrote to a friend that it was “nice to be the first and only woman in it. I am feeling very good about it.” Although she never lived full-time in Taos, maintaining her career in the East and returning to the Southwest each summer for 10 years, she remained a member of the Society until it disbanded in 1927.

Yet, Critcher has never received the level of recognition given to the group’s other members — among them Bert Phillips, Ernest Blumenschein, E. Irving Couse, Joseph Henry Sharp, and Oscar Berninghaus — in part because she was not a full-time resident and thus less integrated into the Taos Society’s activities.

It’s an omission that sorely needs to be amended according to art historians, including Davison Packard Koe

American painter

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 and Charles Hoffbauer. 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. 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 sh