Catharine Critcher

born Westmoreland County, Virginia, 1868; died Blackstone, Virginia, 1964

BiographyCatharine Critcher began studying art in her early 20s at the Cooper Union School of Design in New York City and then at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. She established a successful portrait studio in the DC area, working there for over a decade before traveling to Paris in 1904 and studying at the Académie Julian. In 1905 she founded her own art school in Paris, the Cours Critcher, which she maintained until 1909. Returning to the United States in 1911, she became an instructor at the Corcoran School of Art. In 1924 she founded the Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts in Washington DC. Critcher first visited the West when she traveled to Taos, New Mexico, in 1922. She returned there every summer for many years, doing a series of portraits, mostly of Native American subjects. In 1924 she was voted in as the only female member of the Taos Society of Artists. Later in her career she traveled to Arizona to sketch and paint on the Hopi Indian Reservation and also visited Mexico, Canada, and Nova Scotia.

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