. . . brought up and educated on the family plantation Audley in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Catherine became an avid equestrian and developed an interest in the far more placid occupation of drawing.

She studied for a year at Cooper Union in New York City and then with Eliphalet Andrews at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC. She spent many years in Paris where she attended the Academie Julian under Charles Hoffbauer and Jean-Paul Laurens, with whom she founded the Cours Critcher painting school, to help American art students gain entrance to the French schools. Catherine showed much administrative ability as well as painting talent, but to supplement her income further, she guided American tourists around Europe during the summer months. While abroad, she exhibited in the Paris Salon and served as president of the American Women Painters in Paris.

Returning 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. In 1922, she began teaching with the Sculptor Clara Hill, and in 1924 was unanimously voted into the all-male Taos Society of Artists, as the first and only woman. 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 1920’s when that was not fashionable" (Samuels "Encyclopedia").

For several summers, she painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She went to Mexico in 1936 then to Canada to paint the French Canadians in the Laurentian Mountains and the fisherman of Nova Scotia, and in 1941 to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she did a series on fishermen.

Exhibitions of Critcher's work were mounted in Women’s University Club, Washington, D.C.; in 1938 at the Studio Guild, New York; and in 1940 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1949, the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland, presented a retrospective exhibition of her work. She was active in the Society of Washington Artists, the Southern States Art League, and the National Association of Women Painters, and Sculptors.

Critcher was principally a portrait painter, working in a traditional, realistic manner. Her depictions of the Pueblo Indians of Taos are perceptive character studies.  Catherine died in 1964 in Blackstone Virginia.