A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body.

[4] She then studied at Cooper Union in New York City 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.

[1] Initially she enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she studied under Charles Hoffbauer and Jean-Paul Laurens;[3] her time there was made difficult due to troubles with the French language.

[6] She founded the Cours Critcher in 1905 in an attempt to aid American artists in gaining admission to French schools, an enterprise in which she had the assistance of Miller and Hoffbauer.

[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.

[12] Among the institution's pupils was Sarah Blakeslee, whom Critcher encouraged to enroll in the Chester Springs branch of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts upon graduation from high school.

"[1] In 1924 the all-male Taos Society of Artists unanimously voted her in 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 will be pleased, I know, to hear that a letter just rec’d from Mr. Couse informs me that I have been unanimously elected to active membership in the Taos Society of Artists.

"[16] Unlike many members of the Taos Society, Critcher never lived in New Mexico permanently,[17] choosing to summer there instead for several years;[18][19] it was said of her that she would return to Washington "with a wrinkled, deeply suntanned skin in the 1920s when that was not fashionable".

She died in a nursing home in Blackstone, Virginia;[6] the place of her death is given in some references as Washington, D.C.[12] Critcher's body was returned to Alexandria for burial; she was interred beside her parents and sister Louisa in the family plot at Ivy Hill Cemetery, where her name is misspelled as "Catherine" on her grave marker.

[21] Critcher's early academic style has been described as "dark but pleasing", but it later developed into something powerfully expressive, with a vivid sense of color; in this regard it was greatly similar to the work of other Taos Society painters.

[22] She has been called "a respected artist in the European avant-garde", with an interest in symbolism and abstraction; in this regard, some of her work prefigures that of Georgia O'Keeffe.