Artist Profile

  • rae sloan bredin
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  • rae sloan bredin

Rae Sloan Bredin

  • Lived:
  • 1870-1937
  • Worked:
  • New Hope, PA
  • Style:
  • Portrait, Landscape, Figure

  • Impressionist painter Rae Sloan Bredin, 1855-1911, was well-known within Bucks County, Pennsylvania, art circles, where he was a member of the New Hope group of American Impressionists (In 1915, the artist and critic Guy Péne du Bois had characterized Pennsylvania Impressionist painting as America's "first truly national expression").

    Bredin was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to paint a portrait of Dr. Seneca Egbert, professor of hygiene at the medical school there. He taught at the Chase School of Fine Art, Shinnecock, Long Island, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and the School of Design for Women, Philadelphia, where he trained, and no doubt influenced, the young women students who went on to form "The Philadelphia Ten," in order to gain more equality of exhibition opportunities early in the 20th Century. "The Ten" would exhibit from 1917-1945, with an evolving roster of women artists.

    Bredin is represented in collections within Bucks County, in private collections of American Art, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. He exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; and the National Academy of Design, New York City.

    Reproductions of Rae Sloan Bredin's oil painting, "Artist's Family on a Park Bench," are extremely popular today because of the gentle emotions and attractive color used in his depiction of a mother with her two young daughters seated before a background rich in roses.

    The book, The Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painting: An Original American Impressionism,with essays by Tom Falk, was written to accompany the exhibition at the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania, in 1984. A major reference work with five hundred fifty-four pages, it includes reproductions, biographies and bibliographies of Rae Sloan Bredin and other New Hope Impressionists Walter Baum, Morgan Colt, John F. Folinsbee, Daniel Garber, William L. Lathrop, Edward W. Redfield, Charles Rosen, Walter E. Schofield, Henry B. Snell, Robert Spencer and John H. Twachtman.
    An exhibition in 1997 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, An American Tradition: The Pennsylvania Impressionists, included the work of Rae Sloan Bredin, with that of Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield, John Fulton Folinsbee, Walter Elmer Schofield, William Langson Lathrop, Fern Isabel Coppedge, Walter Emerson Baum and Clarence Johnson. The show originated in 1996 at Beacon Hill Fine Arts, New York City. It later traveled to four venues: the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Dixon Gallery and Gardens,(city) Gibbes Museum of Art, (city) and Woodmere Art Museum (city).

    Rae Sloan Bredin's work was included in the 2001 exhibition, Up the River: Pennsylvania Impressionists and Modernists, at The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The show featured sixty-five landscapes by Impressionists and early modernists of New Jersey's New Hope School, including Walter E. Baum, Fern Coppedge, Daniel Garber and Harry Leith-Ross, from the collection of Jim Alterman. A catalogue, with an essay by Brian Peterson, accompanied the exhibition.

    Source:
    http://www.michaels.com/art/online/artistBio?artistid=2586
    http://www.stormpages.com/emtyville/Section_D_William&Rebecca_Egbert_Fam...
    http://www.usedbookcentral.com/cgi-bin/texis/scripts/ubc/searchbooks.htm...
    http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/newthismonth/ntm11-1-01.asp
    http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus16a.htm

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    Co-founder of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the New York School of Fine Arts, Rae Bredin was a Pennsylvania by birth and remained there most of his life. He was known for his landscape and portrait paintings and especially for his association with the New Hope Impressionist painters, an area he first visited in 1909.

    He studied at Pratt Institute and the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts.

    Source: Michael Zellman, "300 Years of American Art"

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