Baryte (excellent locality specimen)

Item Description

A wonderful big Baryte specimen from Hartsel featuring many attractive, fine quality, good sized, bladed crystals showing a mixture of gentle blue and golden hues, measuring up to 3.6 cm across, free of matrix. The piece actually sits amazingly well on its own without the aid of a base or clay, and it has excellent visceral three-dimensional appeal. A few crystals are broken, so the piece is not completely pristine, but they rarely are completely perfect from this locality. Additionally, specimens do not feature such an eye-catching array of crystals like this, they are typically singles, or maybe a few crystals intergrown, but they can often be "flat" without much character, so I will stress that this is one of the most dramatic and impressive Barytes from Hartsel that we've ever had to offer, especially for the size. Originally from the collection of well-known Colorado field collector and dealer, Don Belsher.
Valued $3,000.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 28.3.1.1 CO.1; 0118 George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information