LOT DETAILS

Materials:

Oil on canvas

Measurements:

95.30 in. (242.06 cm.) (height) by 81.30 in. (206.50 cm.) (width)

Markings:

Signed and dated upper right: Critcher / 36; Titled on label verso: Mother and Daughters

Exhibited:

Southern States Art League, Charleston South Carolina, "18th Circuit Exhibition," 1940-41.Long before her move to Taos in 1924 at the age of fifty-eight where she became the only woman unanimously elected into the all-male Taos Society of Artists, Catharine C. Critcher had established an impressive career as a portraitist and art educator. Critcher's father, a wealthy Virginia judge and U.S. Congressman, adored his fiercely independent daughter, and fully supported her desire to study painting, first at the Cooper Union School of Design in New York in 1890, and subsequently at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. She won medals at both institutions. For the next decade, she worked as a formal portraitist in Virginia and D.C., receiving commissions from elite military and political families such as the rebel Confederate soldier John Singleton Mosby, and later, President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Harry F. Byrd. Like many artists of this period, Critcher was enticed by the artistic developments in Paris, and after a year of training at the Academié Julian, in 1905 she founded the first of several art schools, the Cours Critcher, designed for non French-speaking students. Her successful role as an art school administrator compelled her to teach at the Corcoran School of Art from 1911-17, upon her return to D.C., and in 1924 to open nearby The Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts.By the time Critcher made her first trip to Taos in 1920, the Taos Society of Artists had been active for five years. With the financial backing of the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad, founding TSA members Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, E. Irving Couse, W. Herbert Dunton, Bert Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp had headed to New Mexico to record the exotic land and lifestyle of the Pueblo Indians for tourist publications. For Critcher, the lure of Taos was less the financial gain associated with lucrative illustration assignments than it was the prospect of experiencing a new culture and finding new portrait subjects. Unmarried, she set out on an adventure: "Taos is unlike any place God ever made I believe & therein is charm & no place could be more conducive to work -- there are models galore & no phones -- The artists all live in these attractive funny little adobe houses away from the world, food, foes, and friends" (Van Vechten-Lineberry Taos Art Museum Newsletter, vol. I, no. II, Spring 1996, p. 4). Critcher rendered her "models galore" -- whether women at work, mothers with children, or Indian chiefs -- with especial sensitivity to facial expressions and colorful native clothing.Undeniably Critcher's most ambitious and accomplished work, Mother and Daughters, 1936, celebrates the abundance, hospitality, and promise of her New Mexico home. Here, Critcher positions beneath an outdoor awning a statuesque and proud mother, perhaps a personification of Taos, together with her daughters; her weathered face and formidable hands embodying the strength of her people, the mother offers to the viewer her full basket of ripe pumpkins and gourds. At her knee, a stack of pineapples, the traditional symbol of hospitality, also welcomes the viewer to enter this land of purity and abundance. A slight glimpse into the market in the background suggests trade and prosperity. Critcher underscores the beauty and desirability of the produce by echoing their bright colors in the salmon shirt of the teenage girl, the polka-dotted green skirt of her younger sister, and the sun-kissed highlights in the elder's face. By turning these multi-generational figures in different directions, Critcher suggests that Taos -- its past, present, and future - offers vibrant riches. Indeed, a veritable love song to Taos, Mother and Daughters, 1936 is Critcher's invitation to come and enjoy her city.In Mother and Daughters, Critcher emphasizes both the spirituality and fertility of women - and, by extension, of Taos -- by borrowing the formal vocabulary of early Renaissance Maestà (majesty) paintings that she was likely exposed to in Europe. In works such as Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna, Mary sits on a frontally-positioned throne with Jesus in her lap and angels at her side, while the top of the panel is shaped into a pediment recalling the "canopy of heaven." In Critcher's version of the Maestà composition, the traditional wide-lapped, blue-mantled mother (Madonna) sits with a basket in her lap and her girls at her side, while above her the distinctive triangular top of the tent, through which appears the bustling market beyond, serves as the heavenly canopy. A successful and creative woman, Critcher purposely identified the women of Taos as emblems of the best the city had to offer -- spiritual character and bountiful, beautiful painting subjects.Critcher exhibited widely and won numerous awards in her later career, yet she never placed her Taos paintings in the same category as her private portrait commissions, which funded her income. In fact, before her death, Critcher gave most of her Indian paintings away to family members. For her, they were not commercial products, rather intimate gifts made from the heart about her beloved Taos. Extremely rare to the market, Critcher's Taos paintings capture the only female perspective among TSA members -- and a highly unique one at that.

Provenance:

Private collection, Charlestown, West Virginia; By descent to the present owner.