Catharine Carter Critcher

Catharine Carter Critcher was born on September 13, 1868, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, with some records placing her birthplace more specifically in Oak Grove. She began her formal training at the Arlington Institute in Virginia, then went to New York to study for a year at Cooper Union before continuing her training at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., under Eliphalet Frazer Andrews; she later returned to the Corcoran as a faculty member from 1909 to 1919.

In 1904 she traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian under Richard Miller and Charles Hoffbauer, staying through 1909. While in Paris she founded her own painting school for American students, sometimes recorded as the Cours Critcher. Back in Washington, she later opened the Critcher School of Fine and Applied Arts, teaching alongside her continuing portrait practice.

Critcher first traveled to Taos, New Mexico, in the early 1920s and returned there for extended summer stays, painting Pueblo and Native American subjects alongside landscape and genre scenes. In 1924 she was elected to the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman admitted to the group in its history. She continued to exhibit and teach through the 1930s and 1940s, with solo exhibitions in Washington, D.C., New York, and Hagerstown, Maryland.

She died on June 11, 1964, at about 95 years old. Sources differ on the exact place of death: Wikipedia cites a nursing home in Blackstone, Virginia, 1000Museums cites a nursing home near Farmville, Virginia, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum record states Washington, D.C. She was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.

Critcher's standing rests primarily on her institutional and organizational firsts rather than on a body of contemporaneous published criticism that survives in accessible form. Her election as the sole woman member of the Taos Society of Artists in 1924 is the most consistently cited marker of her recognition among peers, and her earlier medals from the Corcoran School, Cooper Union, and the Witte Museum, along with a first prize of USD 500 from the Southern States Art League, point to steady professional recognition across her career. No verifiable verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; claims about her critical reception are therefore limited to documented honors, exhibition venues, and museum acquisitions rather than quoted commentary.

Critcher's auction market is small and infrequent compared to her male Taos Society peers, consistent with her relatively lower institutional visibility despite her historical significance. The highest price on record is USD 254,500 for the painting Indian Mystic, a figure reported by Heritage Auctions' artist index; the auction house, sale location, and exact sale date are not documented in the sources reviewed, and no auction result has been found that exceeds this figure. A second notable result, Indian Drummer, reportedly sold for over USD 200,000 at auction in 2016, though this figure comes from a single source. Most other recorded sales, including a self portrait that brought USD 30,750 at Santa Fe Art Auction and smaller works sold at regional houses, fall well below her top price, indicating a market where a handful of Native American subject paintings drive most of the value.

Critcher has no catalogue raisonne and no estate or gallery that currently represents her market; historical works surface through auction houses and specialist dealers such as 203 Fine Art in Taos, which has handled and documented her paintings. The auction record for Indian Mystic is sourced from Heritage Auctions' artist index; the sale house, location, and exact date are not documented in the sources reviewed, so collectors should treat those specifics as unconfirmed pending a primary auction record. Because her market is thin, with relatively few tracked sales, provenance and subject matter, particularly her Taos and Pueblo period paintings, tend to matter more than any single benchmark price when assessing a given work.