Catherine Wood (1857-1939)

Catherine Morris Wood (1857-1939) was born in Islington in 1857 to a London barrister and a Scottish mother.  In 1879 she won a scholarship to the Royal Female School of Art (since incorporated into Central St Martins). She was talented and prolific, exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1880, when she was 23, and continuing to show her work there for more than forty years. She also exhibited at the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists, and the Walker Galleries, and was elected a member of the Society of Women Artists (until 1872, the Society of Lady Artists: see quote below), the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils and the RBA, Suffolk Street.
Her skill caught the eye of Walter Sickert, who reviewed ‘The exhibition of Lady Artists in the Drawing-room Gallery of the Egyptian Hall’ (New York Herald, 27 March 1889). Having excoriated the usual ‘same strips of canvas or paper painted by people who ought never to paint’, he picks out ‘Strawberries and Cherries,’ by Catherine N.  Wood, [which] is just about as perfect as they make them. No. 211 reminds me in its smart juiciness of Mr Ludovici’s flower-pictures’
In 1892, at the age of 35, Catherine married the watercolour artist Richard Henry Wright of Hampshire, who painted primarily architectural and landscape subjects. Catherine specialized in still life and genre subjects, but as well as the approved subjects for Victorian female painters – flowers, fruit, interiors of rooms.
Her husband died in 1930, and Catherine herself may have followed him in 1939.