10/17/2026
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT - On this day (October 17) in 1859 artist Fredrick Childe Hassam was born.
“The man who will go down to posterity,” Childe Hassam said in 1892, “is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of every-day life around him.”
Childe Hassam (1859–1935) did just that. One of America’s leading Impressionists, Hassam became celebrated for capturing the streets, parks, gardens, and people of modern life at the turn of the twentieth century.
Born in Massachusetts, Hassam began his career in Boston as an engraver and illustrator before devoting himself increasingly to painting. In 1886, he traveled to Paris, where he established a studio on the Boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre and studied at the Académie Julian.
It was during these formative Paris years that Hassam painted the Haggin Museum’s Carriage Parade (1888). The painting captures the movement, atmosphere, and elegance of the modern city, transforming an everyday moment into a record of its time.
There is also an intriguing connection between the painting and the Haggin family. Louis Terah Haggin and Blanche Butterworth Haggin were living in Paris when Carriage Parade was painted, raising the possibility that they acquired the painting directly from the young artist.
Hassam returned to the United States in 1889 and settled in New York. Over the following decades, he became one of the best-known painters of American Impressionism. In 1898, he helped form The Ten American Painters, a group of artists who championed new directions in American painting. By the early twentieth century, Hassam’s work had entered the collections of many of the nation’s leading museums.
Today, Carriage Parade offers our visitors something particularly special: the opportunity to see Hassam at a pivotal moment in his career, when a young American artist in Paris was finding the subjects and artistic language that would help define his legacy.
