Smithsonite ps. after Tarnowitzite

Item Description

This is a very unusual and very sculptural Smithsonite piece from this famous Tsumeb locale that was found in ONE POCKET in 1929! It is a sparkling cluster of large, blocky, and columnar Tarnowitzite crystals replaced completely by sparkly Smithsonite on top and throughout (and it is heavy, as you would expect). The large crystals are well-formed, prismatic, orthorhombic crystals between 2.5 and 7 cm in length and 2 to 4 cm in width. There are numerous, 3 to 5 mm, rhombohedral crystals of Smithsonite that fill in the areas between the big (former) Tarnowitzite crystals and both are completely blanketed in a druse of a second generation of sparkly Smithsonite. This later generation of Smithsonite has an overall cream color with light mocha-hued highlights, for great aesthetic effect. This is a very handsome and well-composed piece! It is a famous specimen, one of 5 pieces recovered from a single piece that Charlie Key (Keyite) brought to myself and Marshall Sussman in 2003, from a collection in Germany of a retired mining executive from Tsumeb (we never got the name, sadly). Charlie was the legendary Tsumeb dealer and a friend and supporter in my younger days; and I worked exclusively with Marshall Sussman to buy and sell from Charlie up until we also bought his personal collection some time later. This was a monster so big nobody knew what to do, and so I designed a risky trim program for it which was accomplished by Sandor Fuss in his lab, shortly after we purchased this from Charlie. This amazing specimen (approx. 75 cm x 50 cm x 20 cm) was preserved in pristine condition in a collection in Germany, all this time since it was collected in 1929... It consisted of sharp crystals of Tarnowitzite to 6 inches that have been completely replaced by smithsonite on which is another layer of sparkling, glistening white Smithsonite! My trim design yielded up 4 major pieces and this was the second biggest of them, as you can see from the old polaroid photo scan we recovered from archives. Thus, this is not only a significant pseudomorph specimen, but also a significant Smithsonite piece in its own right, and a beautiful one at that! We sold it to Star Van Scriver around 2006, and he sold it to Erika Pohl shortly after, for her Tsumeb suite. Nobody we could find had seen one of these....it was new even to Dr. Pohl with her 10,000 Tsumeb specimens. The piece was simply unique and predated modern collecting so that it was unknown from Tsumeb. In other words, for context: This was an important cabinet display piece to add even to such a collection as the Pohl collection, which at that time already numbered 10,000 specimens. It is pristine, sparkly, complete all around, and hugely impactful in a display case. The other trims from the big plate are now in major collections around the world.