Rhodochrosite, Tetrahedrite and Fluorite on Quartz

Item Description

The Sweet Home Mine once abundantly produced large plates of Rhodochrosite, with gorgeous red crystals contrasted against white quartz points, such as you see here. These came out in several pockets in the late 1990s, and again in the early 2000s. This is from finds of 2002-2004, before the mine was formally closed and shut down. It went to Europe and came back, essentially as it was found at the time. In that era, they did not routinely restore all specimens with epoxy and deep immersive surface cleaning, so what you see here is entirely natural, and authentic, basically only cleaned lightly after coming out. It shows strawberry red rhodochrosite crystals to 2.4 cm, although most are smaller, perched on that desirable contrasting matrix of white quartz. Large rhodochrosite specimens from the Sweet Home Mine can certainly command a premium, and this one is nice because of the centering of color and balance of the piece on display. It could be improved at the lab, only by adding minute restorations of epoxy to some small worn edges, but these are trivial and not visible form distance anyways, so we decided not to do that to the specimen and leave it more authentic than many large plates which receive such extra work. As a large display piece, it is just over 6 inches across and displays well in the middle/back of a shelf which is normally a bit of dead space for lighting, because it does not need much light. The color is actually better with less light in a case. This one, coming out of an old European collection, is one of the few large specimens in this size coming back to market recently. Values on these highly fluctuate, depending on if they are from new finds at a nearby mine, or recycled form old collections at old prices from the 1990s and early 2000s, as we are able to do here. Somebody will get a bargain! Valued $15,000-plus, easily, based on anything available on the shelves at shows.