Knox, Katharine McCook

Biographical Note

Katharine McCook Knox, born 1890, in Washington, D.C., was the daughter of Anson George McCook, a Civil War general from Ohio and later a Republican congressman from New York. Raised in New York, she was married briefly to Hugh S. Knox, son of Philander Chase Knox, senator from Pennsylvania and secretary of state in the administration of William H. Taft. She wrote a history of the Frick Art Reference Library and also published other works on art, including The Sharples, Their Portraits of George Washington and His Contemporaries: A Diary and an Account of the Life and Work of James Sharples and His Family in England and America (1930). In the 1950s, Knox organized or served as consultant on exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and in 1966 was awarded the Corcoran’s Medal of Merit. Knox was vice chairman of the Washington D.C., Republican Central Committee and program chairman of the League of Republican Women of the District of Columbia. She was the author of Surprise Personalities in Georgetown, D.C. (1958), and influential as an art historian in the use of a portrait by G. P. A. Healy of Abraham Lincoln as a commemorative stamp during the Lincoln Sesquicentennial in 1959. She died in Washington, D.C., July 9, 1983.