Quartz ps. After Fluorite & Quartz (Mitch Gunnell & Ed Swoboda Coll.)

Item Description

An aesthetic and sculptural mounded cluster of frosted quartz crystals from the famous Idarado Mine. The piece includes at least 10 quartz pseudomorphs after sharp fluorite octahedrons, to 1.1 cm. Some are hollow epimorph casts. The doubly terminated quartz crystal on the edge is 3.0 cm. This VERY RARE and exceptional pseudomorph from the Idarado has a fine provenance, having been in the Benjy Kuehling and Mitch Gunnell Collections, well-known Colorado collectors and dealers. Ex Ed Swododa Pseudomorph Collection. Ed, who lived from 1917-2013, was one of the United States most successful field collectors. He traveled worldwide and found the world's finest brazilianites in 1945. Ed purchased the Stewart, Tourmaline Queen and Pala Chief pegmatite mines and was part of the renowned "bluecap" tourmaline discovery in 1972 at the Queen. Later projects included boleite and cumengite from the Amelia Mine in Mexico, famous purple adamites from the Ojuela Mine in 1982 and wulfenite and mimetite from the San Francisco Mine in 1989. He assembled several world-class mineral collections (with the famous Alma Queen rhodochrosite), including a superb pseudomorph collection, started in about 1984 and sold in the late 1990s and dispersed in the early 2000s. This is an outstanding example from the collection. Read Ed's biography in the Mineralogical Record Biographical Archive: http://www.minrec.org/labels.asp?colid=630.