Turner Auctions + Appraisals is pleased to present the Collection of the Reverend Charles Hartwell Family on Saturday, November 18, 2023. Offering 150 lots, the sale features a wide array of items, mostly from 19th-century China, including artworks, furniture, decorative arts, prayer beads, jewelry, books, clothing, textiles, family memorabilia, and more. The sale’s items come from the family of Reverend Charles Hartwell, Congregational missionaries and philanthropists in Foochow (Fuzhou), China from the 1850s-1930s. The family members’ items in this auction include Rev. Charles Hartwell (1825-1905) and Lucy Estabrook Stearns Hartwell (1827-1883); their children Charles Stearns Hartwell (1855-1931), Emily Susan Hartwell (1859-1951), and Carrie Amelia Hartwell Tupper (1864-1959).
Furniture items in the sale include armchairs and dining chairs, a curio shelf, cupboard panels, and carved mirrors. Among the artworks are Chinese paintings on paper, ancestor portraits, scroll and miniature pith paintings; several Japanese woodblock prints; and works by Emily Susan Hartwell and Neil Meitzler. From Japan are several woodblock prints, an art pottery vase, and Imari items.
Many decorative arts are on offer, such as cloisonné, glazed, porcelain, celadon and bronze vases; bronze vessels, beakers, censers, and libation cups; snuff bottles; decorative and carved stone objects; polychrome and terracotta figures; porcelain bowls and ginger jars; boxes of burl root, lacquer and porcelain; gilt lacquered temple figures; a silk fan; metal tea caddies; several lamps; and blue and white dishes.
There is also an array of Chinese clothing and textiles: embroidery of gold thread dragon, silk collars and panels; a table runner; a fan; a man’s court robe, a silk short coat; and more. Of note are a selection of high-heeled and lotus shoes, including a booklet on Chinese foot binding made by a Hartwell family member. Lotus shoes were worn by women in China who had bound feet, a very painful tradition that lasted nearly a thousand years, ending only around the 1950s.
Books and publications include ones on Chinese art, textiles, and ceramics; Japanese sculpture; Asian art and rugs; and a signed copy of Baghdad by the Bay by Herb Caen. There are several lots of prayer beads and jewelry of jade, bone, hardstone, silver and/or metal. Family memorabilia includes a Charles Hartwell family archive, a Chinese stamp collection, and 19th-century photographs of China and England.
Auction highlights include a Chinese lavender-blue ovoid vase, a 19th-century ancestral tablet, and a pair of bowls with eight horses of Wang Mu. Several items from other collectors round out the sale.
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