Celestine on Fluorite (excellent locality specimen)

Item Description

While Celestine is fairly well-known from the Annabel Lee Mine in Southern Illinois, pieces like this are few and far between. The two main aspects of the piece that make it so desirable are the overall quality and color of the Celestines, and the fact that they are sitting atop beautiful purple Fluorite. A lot of the Celestines you'll see from this mine are a very pale hue, almost devoid of blue color entirely, but THESE crystals are saturated for the material, with wonderfully sharp, lustrous well-formed faces. The Celestines measure up to 3.5 cm long, and the gemmy purple cubic Fluorites measure up to 7 mm on edge. Minor roughness can be seen, so the piece is not completely undamaged, but it's so showy and colorful, that you can forgive some small imperfections. The label states that the piece was mined on the St. Louis Level of the mine, and the accompanying label from Ross Lillie states it was mined in April of 1989. The piece was formerly in the collection of George Feist. Valued $3,000.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 28.3.1.2 IL.7; 6807 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