Spessartine Garnet on Smoky Quartz (ex Dr. Stephen Smale Collection)

Item Description

These gorgeous Spessartines are some of the most attractive and highly displayable pieces to come out in China in the last 20 years. This is a good quality full sized cabinet specimen featuring sharp, gemmy, lustrous, rich orange-red colored crystals of Spessartine Garnet measuring up to 1.0 cm which are sitting on prismatic, hexagonal Smoky Quartz on beige colored Microcline matrix. The Garnets show excellent trapezohedral faces, and the are notably larger than most Spessartines you'll see from this locality. The piece is in very good condition with minimal damage. One of the Smoky Quartz crystals is contacted, but outside of that, it's in fine shape, save the periphery where the piece was removed from the pocket, though it has been expertly trimmed. I love the fact that the Garnets are brilliant, sharp and smooth - no pitting or dull faces anywhere. Garnet is a well known mineral, but you have to keep in mind that it's quite rare to find brilliant orange Spessartines from any locality in the world, let alone on good sized crystals on matrix like this. Priced at $5,000 in the inventory. Ex Dr. Stephen Smale Collection. Along with amassing one of the finest private mineral collections in the world, Steve is a renowned mathematician. His accomplishments include being awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 along with being the awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics in 2007. You can read Steve's bio on the Mineralogical Record website ( https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/smalestephen/ ) or on Wikipedia.