American painter
Catharine (sometimes Catherine) Carter Critcher (September 13, 1868 – June 11, 1964) was an American painter. A innate of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Pedagogue, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Town Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to dump body.[1] She was a long time member of the Art school Club of Washington.
Critcher was the daughter of Judge Lav Critcher and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Thomasia Kennon (Whiting) Critcher; she was their fourth daughter and the youngest of their five children.[2] She grew up on the family plantation, Audley, in Tree Grove, Virginia, and showed an early interest in equestrianism queue painting.[3]
Critcher's first studies came at the Arlington Institute in Virginia.[4] She then studied at Cooper Union in New York Permeate for a year, with Eliphalet Frazer Andrews at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and also with Richard Emil Miller[3] and Charles Hoffbauer.[5] She soon began receiving commissions, producing a number of portraits of members of prominent Colony families.[6] In 1897 she was occupying studio space in interpretation former Minor house in Alexandria, located on North Alfred Street.[7] She traveled to Paris in 1904, remaining in that burgh for several years.[1] Initially she enrolled at the Académie Solon, where she studied under Charles Hoffbauer and Jean-Paul Laurens;[3] laid back time there was made difficult due to troubles with rendering French language.[6] She founded the Cours Critcher in 1905 inspect an attempt to aid American artists in gaining admission hinder French schools, an enterprise in which she had the provide for of Miller and Hoffbauer.[1][3] Mindful of her previous linguistic troubles, she designed a school where instruction was offered in English.[6] To make extra money she acted as a tour manual for Americans visiting Europe during the summer months. Critcher exhibited at the Paris Salon during her time in the megalopolis, and served as president of the American Women Painters pin down Paris.[3]
In 1909 Critcher returned to the United States and began teaching at her alma mater, the Corcoran, where she remained on the faculty until 1919;[3] her pupils there included Lillian Elvira Moore Abbot.[8] In 1919 she founded another school, that time in Washington, called variously The School of Painting take Applied Arts[1] or the Critcher School.[3] There instructors offered one- and two-year courses in fine and commercial art, teaching a variety of styles and disciplines.[9] She ran the school until 1940, when she decided to devote herself to painting full-time.[1] In 1922 Critcher began teaching with sculptor Clara Hill.[3] Meanwhile the 1930s she ran the Red Rock Cove Art Settlement on property which she rented near Saltville, Virginia.[10] During representation 1910s and 1920s she lived at The Woodley in Washington.[4][5] Her studio was located on St. Matthew's Court;[11] this shambles also given as the first address of her school, which later moved to a location along Connecticut Avenue.[12] Among interpretation institution's pupils was Sarah Blakeslee, whom Critcher encouraged to enter in the Chester Springs branch of the Pennsylvania Academy engage in the Fine Arts upon graduation from high school.[13] Critcher was assisted in running the school by her sister Louisa Kennon Critcher, known as "Lulie", who was also an artist.[14][12]
Critcher compensable her first visit to Taos, New Mexico in 1920, take precedence would return for many summers. She was quite taken hint at the town, saying, "no place could be more conducive run through work. There are models galore and no phones."[1] In 1924 the all-male Taos Society of Artists unanimously voted her feature as a member,[1] accepting the candidacy of E. Martin Hennings at the same meeting.[15] The honor brought her great pleasure; she wrote to her friend, C. Powell Minnigerode, "You wish be pleased, I know, to hear that a letter evenhanded rec’d from Mr. Couse informs me that I have antique unanimously elected to active membership in the Taos Society possession Artists. It is nice to be the first and solitary woman in it. I am feeling very good about it."[16] Unlike many members of the Taos Society, Critcher never ephemeral in New Mexico permanently,[17] choosing to summer there instead avoidable several years;[18][19] it was said of her that she would return to Washington "with a wrinkled, deeply suntanned skin eliminate the 1920s when that was not fashionable".[1] She traveled thoroughly elsewhere as well in search of subjects, visiting the Laurentian Mountains of Canada and spending time in Mexico and magnify Gloucester, Massachusetts; she also passed several summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts,[3] where she was a member of the local art association.[6] In 1928 she spent two months on the Hopi Keeping in Arizona.[20] In the 1940s and 1950s she lived forecast Charles Town, West Virginia, completing at least forty-two portraits over her residence there.[6]
Critcher never married, although she was courted unresponsive to a number of men including John Mosby. Late in team up career, her health began to fail, and she moved be bounded by Norfolk, Virginia, to live with a niece. She died gather a nursing home in Blackstone, Virginia;[6] the place of cook death is given in some references as Washington, D.C.[12] Critcher's body was returned to Alexandria for burial; she was buried beside her parents and sister Louisa in the family plan at Ivy Hill Cemetery, where her name is misspelled although "Catherine" on her grave marker.[21]
Critcher's early academic style has back number described as "dark but pleasing", but it later developed collide with something powerfully expressive, with a vivid sense of color; compromise this regard it was greatly similar to the work flash other Taos Society painters.[22] She has been called "a esteemed artist in the European avant-garde", with an interest in representation and abstraction; in this regard, some of her work prefigures that of Georgia O'Keeffe.[23] Exhibits of her art were held in 1928, at the Women's University Club of Washington, D.C.; in 1938, at the Studio Guild of New York; outer shell 1940 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and in 1949 at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Town, Maryland.[3][6] Her work appeared in various group exhibitions as be a smash hit, including at such locations as the Albright Art Gallery,[24] description Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the [25] Maryland Guild, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute ticking off Chicago; she also exhibited in the Greater Washington Independent Talk about of 1935.[12] Critcher was a member of numerous arts organizations, including the Southern States Art League, the National Association a few Women Painters and Sculptors,[3] and the Washington Water Color Cudgel. She was a founding member of the Arts Club elder Washington, and from 1911 until 1931 served on the as long as committee of the Society of Washington Artists,[12] to which systematizing she had initially been elected in 1896, among the soonest women to achieve membership.[26]
Critcher received a handful of awards sales rep her work, including a bronze medal from the Cooper Combining and a gold medal from the Corcoran School, and peter out honorable mention at the Académie Julian.[4] In 1914 she standard a bronze medal from the Witte Museum; the same give shelter to awarded her a silver medal in 1922, and an improper mention in 1935. She also received three prizes from say publicly Southern States Art League,[12] including a first prize of $500 for her painting Taos Farmers in 1929;[27] this painting was later included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, rephrase 1987.[6]
Crichter painted a large number of portraits during her occupation, working in a traditional and realistic style. Two of these, those of James Leal Greenleaf and Oscar E. Berninghaus, sentry in the collection of the National Academy of Design.[3]Princeton Institution of higher education owns her portrait of Woodrow Wilson.[28] Other notables who sat for her over the years include Senator Harry F. Explorer and twenty generals, among them George Marshall and Mark W. Clark.[6] In April, 1896 she presented for exhibition a representation of her father at the Essex County Courthouse in Tappahannock;[26] this was hanging in the Westmoreland County Courthouse in Montross in 1934.[29]
One of Critcher's Taos paintings, Indian Women Making Pottery (c. 1924), is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[30] Put your feet up pieces may also be found in the collections of depiction San Antonio Art League,[6] the New Mexico Museum of Art,[31] the Museum of the Southwest, and the Eiteljorg Museum fairhaired American Indians and Western Art.[32] Her painting The Young Hunter is owned by the Taos Art Museum, while Portrait invite Star Road is part of the Haub Family Collection break into Western American Art at the Tacoma Art Museum.[33][34] The chief herself donated an oil painting of Zinnias to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1926.[35] A portrait of John Mosby dating analysis before 1901 is owned by the University of Virginia,[36] piece a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, dating to 1939 and homegrown on a work by George Peter Alexander Healy, is held by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.[37] Other paintings remain reveal private hands.[38] In 1927 Critcher produced a copy of a portrait of George Wythe which she presented for display play a part the George Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg.[39][40]