Catherine Carter Critcher (1868 – 1964)

Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, she became the first and only woman member of the Taos Society of Artists in Taos, New Mexico. She studied at Cooper Union in New York City and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC. She spent many years in Paris where she attended the Academie Julian and then founded the Cours Critcher painting school, where she showed much administrative ability as well as painting talent.

She returned to the United States in 1909, and from 1911 to 1917 was an instructor at the Corcoran School of Art and in 1923 in Washington D.C., founded another school of art, The Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts. She served as director until 1940 when she decided to devote herself full time to painting.

In 1920, she first went to Taos, New Mexico. She said . . . "no place could be more conducive of work. There are models galore and no phones." 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. where she would return after her summers in Taos "with a wrinkled, deeply suntanned skin in the 1920s when that was not fashionable" (Samuels "Encyclopedia").

This biography from the Archives of AskART