Catharine Carter Critcher (1868–1964)

The only woman member of the Taos Society of Artists, Catharine Critcher was born into a wealthy family in Virginia, where her father, a former cavalry officer in the Confederate army, was a prominent judge. During Reconstruction, he was removed from office for having borne arms against the United States. A year later, he made a successful run for Congress. Catharine spent her childhood at Audley, the family plantation in Oak Grove, Virginia, and eventually pursued a career as a portrait painter, receiving commissions from a clientele of wealthy Virginia blue bloods.

Critcher had been trained in portraiture at the Cooper Union in New York and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. One summer, she studied under William Merritt Chase. In 1904, she enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, one of the few art schools of the time that admitted women and allowed them to draw from the male nude.

After returning to the United States, Critcher happened upon a traveling exhibition of work by members of the Taos Society of Artists. She made her way to Taos, where she spent the summer painting portraits of Native American and Hispanic people. Critcher’s succinct reaction to Taos was, “No place could be more conducive to work. There are models galore and no phones.”

Beginning in 1920, Critcher spent many summers in Taos, eventually becoming a member of the TSA at age fifty-six. She never made Taos her permanent home.

Oscar Berninghaus’s daughter, Dorothy Berninghaus Brandenberg, is reputed to have said about Critcher: “I often wonder how she got along with some of those old boys in the Society because they were pretty . . . pleased with themselves.”

There seems to be little doubt that Catharine Critcher could fend for herself. While in Paris she had established the Cour Critcher, an art school for Americans who had difficulty navigating the French educational system. In Washington, DC, she founded a second art school with a colleague, the Critcher-Hill School of Art, which she ran for almost two decades while maintaining her career as an established portrait artist. By 1940, Critcher was probably the best-known portrait painter in DC.

Critcher taught until she was seventy-two, painted into her eighties, and lived to be ninety-five.

Her gravestone records her name incorrectly as Catherine Carter Critcher, rather than giving the spelling she used, “Catharine.”