Context -- THE CARRIAGE PARADE by Frederick Childe Hassam

While the Haggin Museum staff is working on redesigning our art galleries, we have also been examining the stories and context that has long been attached to our core collection. Our team is specifically interested in how our new exhibit design will bring additional stories to the forefront of the Haggin collection. Through these discussions, many paintings in the Haggin collection have been deemed anchors to the Museum’s core collection and the Haggin narrative. These well-loved, historic Haggin favorites have been celebrated by our community; they have become essential to any discussion about the meaning and interpretation of the core collection. Childe Hassam’s THE CARRIAGE PARADE is one of those paintings.  

Frederick Childe Hassam spent his formative years studying art in Boston. Between 1886 and 1889 Hassam lived in Paris and studied traditional academicism at the popular Académie Julian. Upon arrival in Paris, Hassam’s visually conservative techniques underwent a transformation that would influence the rest of his career, earning him later prestige as one of the most successful American Impressionists in history. 

Well beyond a traditional arts education, what Hassam found during those critical years in Paris was a community of French Impressionists who were involved in a somewhat controversial visual revolution. While contentious in its infancy, French Impressionism would go on to become one of the most celebrated modern art movements in history. 

Hassam, whose work was generally more conservative than the French Impressionists, was attracted to the movement because of its affiliation with the earlier styles of British Romanticism, particularly the landscape paintings of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Hassam had long admired the heavy brushwork (or impasto) of these earlier artists whose work was celebrated by the French Impressionists. 

By 1888 Hassam had painted THE CARRIAGE PARADE, a depiction of open coaches proceeding down the Champs-Élyssés Boulevard toward the Arc de Triomphe. Clearly adapting core Impressionist tenets, Hassam’s brushwork provides the atmospheric effects of a hazy spring day. French Impressionists developed methods to capture a moment in time by focusing on the more intuitive experiences of time and place. Hassam’s painting achieves this with the use of a low vantage point to draw the viewer in, making them an active participant in the scene, rather than a mere spectator. Furthermore, Hassam implies the sense of infinity by cropping the edges of the scene. The result is that the sounds, temperature, bustle and emotional spirit of the French city can be clearly imagined far beyond the frame of the painting. 

Childe Hassam, The Carriage Parade, 1888.

Oil on canvas. 15 x 12 in.  The Haggin Collection.

Louis Terah Haggin and his wife Blanche Butterworth Haggin (parents of Eila Haggin McKee, the Museum’s founding donor) spent a considerable amount of time living between San Francisco, New York and Paris during the latter part of the 19th century. The socially prestigious couple acquired paintings at auctions, from art dealers and from artists themselves, but they did not keep accurate records. While there are many gaps in Haggin records about how and when THE CARRIAGE PARADE joined the collection, there are clear links between the artistic interests of Childe Hassam, Louis Terah and Blanche Butterworth Haggin.

The Haggins also spent a large part of the 1880s in Paris. It was likely their love of the modern Parisian lifestyle that so attracted them to Hassam’s work during this period. While the Haggins often preferred the more traditional academic styles, they also had a taste for the avant-garde, as evidenced by some of the more aesthetically liberal artists found in the collection such as Renoir and Gauguin. One can only speculate that the Haggin family saw Hassam’s THE CARRIAGE PARADE as a celebration of Paris, by an accomplished academicist who was not afraid to experiment with the contemporary styles.