Photograph, Catharine Carter Critcher Painting in Taos, NM, 1923, (This photograph appeared in the Washington Post on June 5, 1921), reidhall.globalcenters.columbia.edu.

Catharine Critcher was absent the day a group photograph was taken of the Taos Society of Artists, established in 1915, in New Mexico, and this may be why she is largely forgotten today, despite having had a stellar art career. In 1884, Critcher and her family relocated to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live. Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia (near George Washington’s birthplace) at Audley Plantation in Oak Grove, Critcher and four siblings were born to Judge John Critcher, who served as an officer in the Confederate Army and later practiced law, became a member of the U.S. Congress, and a circuit judge in Alexandria. 1

Photograph, Charles Lord, Taos Society of Artists (1915-1927), 1932, Palace of the Governors, New Mexico Museum of History, Photo Archives, Santa Fe, NM.

Sixteen years old when the family relocated to Alexandria, Critcher knew she wanted to be an artist and had enjoyed drawing and equestrian sports during her youth. She chose not to finish college, but rather spent one year at New York’s Cooper Union in 1890, where she won a bronze medal.  Back in Alexandria, she established an artist sketch club held in her family home and taught art at the Alexandria School of Art.  Her family owned a ten-room Federal residence at 111 North Alfred Street in Alexandria, and she set up her own art studio with other artists in a nearby building 1 In 1894, she and another artist friend attended William Merritt Chase’s renowned summer art school in Shinnecock, Long Island. During this time, she continued her art studies at local schools and by 1898 she was a member of the Washington Watercolor Club and was elected a member of the Society of Washington Artists.

Photograph, Cox File, John Critcher family residence, 111 N. Alfred Street, Alexandria, VA, c. 1950s, Local History/Special Collections, Barrett Branch Library, Alexandria, VA

Independent and driven, Critcher went to Paris in 1901, her father having died that same year. She studied art at the Académie Julian with Jean-Paul Laurens and Charles Hoffbauer.  Living at the American Art Students Club as so many American women art students did at that time (See Blog 38: A Club of Their Own), she exhibited her work at the club’s annual art exhibitions, established in 1893.  These exhibitions showcased women students’ artwork because such opportunities were rare in the male-dominated French Salons. In seeing Catharine Critcher’s Paris work early in her career, Edgar Degas commented: “Who would have thought a woman could paint like that.” 2 

By 1902 she was back in the United States and chose to locate in Washington, DC, the urban capital just across the Potomac River from Alexandria.   During the next few years she set up her studio on F Street and began to focus on portrait painting as a living.  She was also exhibiting her work at local galleries such as the long-established Veerhoff Galleries and at the Corcoran Museum of Art School; the museum was established in 1869 and later, the art school in 1890. She was also guiding art tours, including a student trip to Holland where the group visited Volendam and Laren. In June 1904, a stove fire destroyed the contents of her F Street studio, and unfortunately she lost most of the paintings that she had created over the past five years. 

Heading back to Europe, Critcher arrived in Paris again in 1905, setting a pattern of returning to the mid-Atlantic area during the winters to live with family.  In Paris, while studying again and exhibiting her work, she established the Cours Critcher, her own art school, which she ran with the help of her former teachers Laurens and Hoffbauer.  She opened this school to help American art students adapt to French instruction methods, which demanded long apprenticeships and a language barrier that deterred American students’ learning. From her own experience, she had realized that American art students were unprepared for Paris. She continued to exhibit her own work in the Salons and took a studio at 86, rue Notre Dame des Champs, a space that Whistler had previously occupied.  Her sister Louisa, Lulie, also an artist, joined her there. By 1906 she was living in Montparnasse, the bohemian art enclave in the city, continuing to mount her work at the American Art Student Club’s exhibitions. She was elected president of the American Woman’s Art Association, begun in 1893, in order to exhibit women’s work at the Art Students Club, shows that would continue over the next twenty-five years. 

In 1909, at age 41, she returned to America and Washington, DC, settling down into her decades-long art career.  Critcher became an art teacher at the Corcoran School of Art, where she had been a student, until 1919. She continued her student art tours to Europe, including Italy, Great Britain, Scotland, Canada, and Mexico. She lived with her sister at the Woodley, an elegant residence located on Connecticut Avenue. Her thriving art career focused on portraiture of military figures, politicians, and national civic leaders, including President Woodrow Wilson (portrait now at Princeton University). She also continued her pattern of summer travels with winters in Washington, DC.  In June 1913, on the eve of the First World War, Critcher traveled to Brittany for four months to study plein air painting with renowned artist Richard Miller, at St. Jean du Doigt (perhaps a diversion from the rigors of formal portraiture painting). 

After World War I began, most artists returned to the United States, settling in search of the “picturesque” often found in art colonies where they could continue their work during the European War.  Critcher had known several women artists at the American Art Students Club in Paris who probably encouraged her to locate in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the art colony which has been discussed in my previous blogs on the American Women Artists’ website.  Critcher studied with Charles Hawthorne, a noted impressionist painter who taught there. She shared a cottage with two women artists. In June 1915, Critcher exhibited her work with forty-four other artists in the first annual exhibition of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum established in 1914.  Little record remains of her time at this historically important art colony. 

By 1919, living permanently in Washington, DC, she resigned her faculty position at the Corcoran Art School. She established her own school, as she had daringly done in Paris, and called it the Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts, offering one– and two-year courses in fine art and commercial art. Advertisements for the school appeared in Washington’s popular Evening Star newspaper. The Critcher School was first located in her studio in what is called St. Matthew’s Alley off Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. Wedged between Connecticut and Rhode Island Avenues in a privileged neighborhood, this alley had been laid out for stables and carriages in the 19th century. It was transformed into an artist enclave echoing Paris’s bohemian Latin Quarter. It is recorded that Critcher, along with fellow women artists, Ellen Day Hale and Gabrielle de VeauxClements, “teamed up . . . in November 1915 to convert the historic stables . . . into functional art studios.” 3 Ellen Day Hale and Gabrielle de Veaux Clements were lifelong partners with whom Critcher had associated at the American Art Students Club, where Clements exhibited her etchings in 1908. Hale was also serving a social role as hostess for her father, who was the Unitarian Chaplain for the United States Senate. The old buildings and warehouses housed artists, musicians, galleries, and a theater. Over time, some of the resident artists included Eben Comins, Louise Goff, Edward Beatty Rowan, and George-Julian Zolany, a sculptor who carved many Confederate statues. 

Photograph, Jann Haynes Gilmore, Former stables converted into Studios, St. Matthew’s Court / Alley, July 9, 2026, Washington, DC.

Photograph, Edward Beatty Rowan (1898-1946), Artist and 1930s WPA Administrator, St. Matthew’s Alley (Court), c. 1932, dchistory.com.

By 1924, Critcher had moved her school to 1603 Connecticut Avenue, a higher-visibility location, and soon it was called the Critcher Hill School, offering courses at $20 monthly in drawing, painting, interior and costume design, and children’s art classes. Clara Lavinia Hill (1870-1935), a sculptor, had studied in the US and Paris, including with Augustus St. Gaudens, and joined Critcher in the school as a full-time instructor. Hill was the daughter of the Chief of Engraving at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing; again, a well-heeled professional woman artist. Now able to focus more on her own painting, Critcher was free to exhibit her work more widely in the mid-Atlantic area, and sister Lulie was serving as administrator.  Critcher eventually closed this school in 1940. 

During the 1930s, Catharine Critcher ran a summer art camp called Red Rock Cove Art Camp in southwestern Virginia in the town of Saltville. Little information is available on her art experience there. In 1926, Critcher’s New Mexico canvas, Zinnias, entered the collection of Randolph Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. Critcher also changed many residences during this period, including living one year at the Washington Arts Club, where she was a founding member, its downtown location being the former home of James Monroe. During the 1940s/1950s, Critcher spent time in Charles Town, West Virginia, away from the distractions in DC and produced some forty-two portraits. She painted hundreds of portraits of prominent sitters over her career including twenty military generals, politicians, civic leaders including her father, Judge Critcher, whose portrait hangs in the Montrose, Virginia courthouse, Woodrow Wilson (Princeton University), George Marshall, John Mosby, (Civil War hero and one time Critcher suitor – University of Virginia), Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln Presidential Library), George Wythe (Colonial Williamsburg), and Dr. Angus Crawford, head of Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria (Virginia Theological Seminary). 

Catharine Carter Critcher, The Rev. Dr. Angus Crawford, Dean, oil portrait, 1898, Courtesy of Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA (Special thanks to Vincent Williams and Denton Wait, Bishop Payne Library, VTS).

In a seminal book, Independent Spirits, art historian Linda Nochlin observed that portraiture is particularly suited to women’s capacity for “personal analysis.” 4 Critcher’s early portraits were formal in an academic style using a dark palette, much in the fashion of Thomas Eakins. But a move by Critcher in 1920 changed her painting technique, enhanced her intellectual and aesthetic horizons, and brought her more national exposure. Looking for broader subject matter and models, Catharine Critcher traveled to New Mexico in 1920, first planning to travel to Italy, then deciding that America offered just as much inspiration.  She had attended a traveling East Coast exhibition sponsored by the Society of Taos Artists of Taos, New Mexico, and afterward she was inspired to travel there. Helen, daughter of a Taos Society member, Ernest Blumenschein, quoted his later written opinion regarding the lure of Taos and its environs:  Arriving artists “found fresh material . . . having been ennuied with the hackneyed subject matter of 1,000 painters; windmills in a Dutch landscape; Brittany pheasants with sabots; French roads lined with Normandy poplar; a lady in negligee reclining on sumptuous divan . . . gazing at a mirror . . . powdering her nose; etc. We felt the need of simulating subjects.” 5 Other artists disagreed:  Stuart Davis observed that New Mexico was “. . . a place for an ethnologist, not an artist” and he produced little work there. 6 

But Critcher was so thrilled by the magic landscape and Native American and Hispanic culture that she returned to the Southwest for ten consecutive summers. She recorded after an early visit to Taos: There is “. . . no place more conducive to work, there are models galore and no phones, the artists all live in these . . . little adobe houses away from the world, food, foes and friends.” 7 One chuckles at the description a friend noted regarding Critcher’s appearance upon returning to Washington, DC for the winter. Ever the lady, she was “wrinkled, deeply suntanned skin in the 1920s when it was not fashionable.” 8 

Catharine Carter Critcher, Pueblo Family, oil on canvas, 1928, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN, medicinemangallery.com.

In New Mexico, Critcher was unburdened by the proper vanity required for her East Coast sitters. Her palette brightened, and in this new experience her portraiture and figures began to evoke honesty: “the essence of the individual . . .  not the sitters’ exterior” and she “wanted to know the pueblo people.” 9 Particularly with Native American sitters, her work’s romanticism was replaced by modernism with antecedents in the work of Cezanne and inspiration from contemporary artists like Robert Henri, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, and Marsden Hartley who were also painting in New Mexico.  In 1928 she spent two months on the Hopi reservation in Arizona capturing tender familial groups in staged settings, employing freer brush strokes with bolder color preferences. Her figural compositions no longer imposed confrontational views and spatial perspective that were required for academic portraiture. 

Catharine Carter Critcher, Indian Women Making Pottery, 1924, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, americanart.si.edu.

Catharine Carter Critcher, Flamingo Calla, n.d., oil on linen, invaluable.com.

Critcher went largely unnoticed during her first years in Taos, never buying a home, but living with “an emotionally disturbed woman who slept with a loaded pistol.” But in 1924, she arrived with a letter of introduction to the most irascible of all the male Society members, Walter Ufer.  That year, the Society’s sales were falling, and the Society members invited her to become a member, thinking she could boost the group’s national reputation and revenues.  She expressed her pleasure writing back East: “You will be pleased, I know, to hear that a letter just received from Mr. (Irving) Couse who 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 invited. I am feeling good about it.” 10 

The Taos Society of Artists had always been known as an “o’l boys’ network and the local Taos News published an article on Critcher in 2017, quoting the granddaughter of another of the Society members, Oscar Berninghaus, regarding Critcher’s place in the all-male group: “Critcher was a good friend of all the Taos group . . . and such a lovely lady she was nice looking and so very gracious.  I often wondered how she got along with some of those old boys because they were pretty positive and pleased with themselves and to ‘take in’ a woman . . . was quite a consideration.”  An insight into Critcher’s personality is rare, but Berninghaus’s granddaughter continued: “I recall her as having a very deep voice, her complexion very natural, her hair graying and a bit unkempt and her clothes were unimportant to her.” The granddaughter also explained that Critcher could be one of the boys when needed as when she came to lunch at their house and she would “enjoy a before-lunch cocktail” with her artist grandfather. 11 

Catharine Carter Critcher’s “undeserved obscurity” is a label I often use when writing about overlooked American women artists. Some could blame her unsung story on the simple fact that Critcher was absent on the day a photographer took the iconic Taos Society of Artists group photographs. Currently, Critcher’s legacy is on the rise, however, aided by last year’s purchase of her Self-Portrait, c. 1900, held previously in a New York collection, by the Couse-Sharp House and Museum in Taos. The museum’s publicity proudly states that its recent Critcher acquisition  is “a rare glimpse into the artist’s perspective and character, revealing strength, poise and determination that marks her career.”  In a national context, the Couse Museum added that the portrait “celebrates the ground-breaking role she played within the Taos Society of Artists and the artwork allows a more inclusive, comprehensive story of Taos in the broader American art development.” 12 

Catharine Carter Critcher, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, Couse-Sharp Historic Site, Taos, NM, (purchased in 2024), taos.news.com.

Critcher’s health failed at the end of her life, and she moved to Norfolk, Va to live with a niece. She died in a senior home in Blackstone, Virginia in 1964 and is buried in the Critcher family plot in the historic Ivy Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.

Photograph of Critcher Burial Marker [First name misspelled]: Jann Haynes Gilmore, Critcher Family Plot, Historic Ivy Cemetery, est. 1856, Alexandria, VA.

Taos, NM now recognizes Critcher’s importance and it is time for my town to claim our own and to elevate Catharine Carter Critcher’s standing in American art history.

Endnotes:

1. Historic Alexandria City Directories have yielded vital information about the Critcher family’s occupation of properties.  The 1895 directory lists the Critcher family living at 502 Duke Street (one block from the Janney family in the 400 block) and by c. 1900, the Critcher family address is listed as 111 North Alfred Street; this “ten room” Federal residence cited in Critcher research. The Minor House, where she occupied an art studio “in a building with other artists,” appears to have been destroyed with no available records.  A Minor family was living in Alexandria during this period and is listed in the directory as domestics and laborers, but with no Alfred Street address. Local History/Special Collections, Barrett Branch Library, Alexandria, VA.
2. Scott Gerdes, Taos News, Taos, New Mexico, October 5, 2017, taosnews.com.
3. “St. Matthew’s Court,” Google Search (DC Office of Planning, Q Street Fine Art), AI Overview.
4. Patrica Trenton, ed., Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, Chapter VI: Sandra D’Emilio and Sharyn Udall, “Inner Voices, Outward Forms: Women Painters in New Mexico,” page 169 and 286: Notes VI.36.
5. Van Deren Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment: 1882-1942, University of New Mexico, 1963, pages 12-13.
6. Ibid., p.64.
7. Catharine Critcher, Mark Sublette, Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ, medicinemangallery.com.
8. Catharine Carter Critcher, en.wikipedia.org.
9. Critcher, en.wikipedia.org.
10. Critcher, en.wikipedia.org.  
11. Gerdes, Taos News.
12. “Catharine Critcher Comes Home,” Taos News, November 25, 2024.