Baryte on Fluorite

Item Description

A very attractive big cabinet piece from the Rosiclare District in Southern Illinois featuring wonderful "rosette" groups of Baryte comprising white-beige colored bladed crystals measuring up to 2.2 cm sitting atop translucent Fluorite matrix showing a mixture of dark brown, purplish and light golden hues. Most of the Barytes are undamaged, but there are few contacted areas, so the piece is not completely pristine, but still very showy and good quality overall. The Barytes are notably lustrous for this locality and "rosette"-shaped groups are not terribly common from most mines in Hardin County. The piece interestingly was part of the collection of Joseph D'Agostino, who was an executive at RCA, and originally the piece passed through the hands of noted dealer Martin Ehrmann.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 28.3.1.1 IL.42; 8081 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