Dioptase with Fornacite and Chrysocolla

Item Description

Dioptase is not found at any locality in California, and this piece is a lovely and rarely seen example from Blue Bell Mine in California. The crystals from this locality are never terribly large, often only micros, and this piece is a fairly rich example featuring drusy micro crystals intermixed with Fornacite, Chrysocolla and Calcite on matrix. While crystals are tiny, we have done our best to photograph them piece with a Canon MP-E 65 mm macro lens to better illustrate the quality.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 383 CA.1; 8825 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