Quartz (scepter crystals) on Arsenopyrite (ex Dr. Stephen Smale Collection)

Item Description

The Huanggang Deposit is one of the great Chinese specimen producers in recent years, yielding a wide variety of fine quality, showy and attractive mineral specimens. This piece is a fantastic cabinet sized piece loaded with sharp, well-formed, gemmy, lustrous, virtually colorless Quartz crystals with a predominantly pyramidal habit, but if you look closely, you'll see that some of them are actually scepters with beautiful stacked overgrowth formations. The largest individual scepter was difficult to isolate, but I found one that measures 3.7 cm on the front portion of the specimen. The Quartz crystals have a beautiful mixture of glassy and frosted faces, creating an eye-catching dual tone effect, which is really difficult to capture accurately in the photos/video, but looks fantastic in person. The matrix is composed of a crystallized mound of sharp, lustrous, silvery metallic Arsenopyrite crystals, which makes for a wonderful contrast against the Quartz. A small amount of black Sphalerite crystals can be seen on the underside of the piece. The specimen sits beautifully on its own without the aid of a base or clay, and looks great from several angles. No major damage anywhere, and truly impressive from the standpoint of composition, size, quality and aesthetics. Very few of these exist in this size, and you'd be hard-pressed to find another like it offered at auction for such a low reserve price. We had this one priced at $5,000 in the inventory. Ex Dr. Stephen Smale Collection. Along with amassing one of the finest private mineral collections in the world, Steve is a renowned mathematician. His accomplishments include being awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 along with being the awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics in 2007. You can read Steve's bio on the Mineralogical Record website ( https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/smalestephen/ ) or on Wikipedia.