Elbaite Tourmaline on Quartz with Lepidolite (ex Barker Coll.)

Item Description

This gorgeous matrix of quartz hosts a 16-cm-tall multicolored green and blue tourmaline crystal, shootign straight up. It has a perfect aesthetic from the front display angle, as you see here, and LOOKS like a million bucks. The crystal is thick, lustrous, and elegant in display. It is exceptionally gemmy in the bototm 2/3, and darker in the top third. Note that in fluroescent room lighting, it can be more blue-green, but it is more green-blue under LED (typical for tourmalines, they look slightly different in different wavelengths of light!). The quartz crystal has a fine termination and is complete as you see it from the front, although has some growth contacting on the bottom and the back sides (not damage, just where it grew against something). Minor purple lepidolite covers the base of the tourmaline both as it is exposed AND inside, included within the gemmy quartz itself so you can see hte purple floating within. The piece has a majestic look to it, to be sure. It is, certainly, worth a fair amount of money; but I need to clarify it has some problems in person that I want to clearly convey as to why something that looks like it is worth six figures is in the auction at a bargain. When you backlight it as shown, with only moderate backlighting required and without frontlighting strongly, you do not see any cracks or repairs. However, in the other photos here, you can see that in normal light without backlighting, when light does shine on the front directly, you can see multiple repair lines. There are 4 repairs at the midpoint and below, several with relatively minor but visible gap-fill of epoxy (plastic) at the site of the repair. In flat frontal light, these repairs are obvious. With backlighting, any visible repair cracks disappear to the normal eye and it glows in a case. This specimen is like Jekyll and Hyde - beautiful and a total value if displayed well in the proper manner for the piece, with backlighting as described clearly here. That being said, the fact that this huge 6.5-inch tourmaline is leaping straight up from a quartz point (itself very sharply terminated) is highly appealing and dramatic in a display case! An old specimen from the Charles and Flora Barker collection. 1100 grams. Valued $5000-plus