significant Baryte with Hematite (Barker Coll.) - circa 1800s

Item Description

This is an important specimen of the most classic style of English baryte going back to the mid 1800s era of mining here, from the region whose mineral wealth built the foundations (literally) of our industrial revolution in mining and raw materials. These thick, blocky, lustrous crystals reach 9 cm tip to tip, and the two large 9 cm-tall crystals are just over 2 cm thick - very robust, very impactful in person. This is a three-dimensional piece, hard to convey in photos, so please see the video. Unlike most such antique barytes, which tend to be singles, this is a cluster. They are essentially blue barytes, but slightly included with iron from the environment they formed in, and so have red zoning throughout. This makes them immediately identifiable from museums and books, as the baryte from England's iron mines, and from a time range generally of the early 1800s to the late 1800s. These are in the old books! This specimen is a majestic cabinet sized display piece. The matrix is calcite, dolomite, and hematite. It is not quite pristine, but it is damned close, for something of such an age (details: The large frontal top crystal has a few minor chips and a ding at the front corner, but that can be fixed in lab if somebody wishes although we think it is trivial; and the second large crystal to the right has a very small amount of wear, and one contact at the bottom - otherwise being doubly terminated). There are a few minor dings, that's all - nothing distracting and nothing that cannot be ameliorated should you send this to a lab. However, we like the antique look. It is not over-cleaned. It looks old. Only the largest and most antique collections today contain specimens like this, themselves having been purchased as the previous generation of collections built in the early 1900s recycled. I have not seen a piece of this caliber and size for sale since the Ed David and Marc Weill collections came up (twice in the last 20 years). It is big, imposing, important...see the video. This extremely generous donation is from the private collection of J.C. Barker, donated in support of the Mineralogical Record at Auction. Valued $15000-20000.