Tiger's Eye Carving (circa 1950s)

Item Description

Tiger's Eye is something that most people are familiar with since it's a staple of rock shops and museum gift shops all over, but the material is typically not presented in a "collector" kind of way. This piece is not your typical example of this material, as it is a wonderful vintage carving dating back to the 1950s featuring a hand-carved flower in a "teardrop"-shaped piece of solid Tiger's Eye. When you turn the piece on its side, you can see the beautiful golden chatoyant banding for which this material is best known. Interestingly, for many years we were lead to believe the Tiger's Eye was a formed as a result of a pseudomorph of Quartz replacing Crocidolite Amphibole, but Heaney and Fisher in 2003 offered a new insight as to how the material formed stating, "that tiger's-eye classically exemplifies synchronous mineral growth through a crack-seal vein-filling process." This means that both the Quartz and Amphibole are present within the stone, and there isn't a pseudomorphic replacement, but rather the minerals existed or occurred at the same time. A collector quality display piece of this beautiful material. You don't see a lot of pieces of Tiger's Eye this size on the market, and carvings like this are even rarer in my experience. The carving weighs 270.40 grams.
From the collection of Colorado mining legend, Dave Bergman. Dave is now retired, but among other things, he was the foreman and primary person in charge of recovering specimens at the famous Sweet Home Mine near Alma, Colorado during the late 1970s. He is also the maternal grandfather of Brian Kosnar. See Dave's photo mining at the Sweet Home on page 58 of Peter Bancroft's book "Gem and Crystal Treasures".