Rae Sloan Bredin

(American, 1880 - 1933)

Rae Sloan Bredin, a native Pennsylvanian born in Butler, was a member of the school of Pennsylvania Impressionists who lived and worked in New Hope. Bredin graduated from Pratt Institute in New York in 1899 and continued his training at the New York School of Art where he studied with William Merritt Chase and Frank Vincent DuMond. While he was in New York he became friendly with Charles Rosen and Bredin’s first arrival in New Hope was for the purpose of visiting Rosen in 1911. Bredin returned a number of times to New Hope to visit Rosen and to study with William Lathrop, but also to visit with Alice Rachel Price, the sister of art dealer Frederic Newlin Price and painter M. Elizabeth Price. Bredin was married in 1914 to Alice Price and, after spending that summer in France and Italy, moved permanently to New Hope and into a house on a towpath along the canal. Bredin was a founding member of The New Hope Group which included Rosen, Morgan Colt, Daniel Garber, William Langson Lathrop and Robert Spencer. They, along with Edward Redfield, are considered the core of the Pennsylvania Imppresionist School. Bredin's landscapes were an important adjunct to the portraits for which he was primarily noted and his work is set apart from the other New Hope impressionists by his frequent depiction of quiet interiors and figurative subjects.