Willemite

Unknown Owner

Help improve this recordNo owner is registered for this specimen yet. If it's yours or you know more about it, you can add the owner, provenance, publications and other details.

Although Willemite is famous from Franklin and Sterling Hill, New Jersey, Tsumeb produced some of the world's best Willemite display specimens with in hues of tan, yellow, and even blue, but they were rare and seldom seen and came out in only a few special pockets - each different in form and color from the others. This sparkling specimen is a gorgeous and robust piece from a single unique pocket of the 1980s, known for stunning Willemite crystals of this translucent, sparkling, champagne color. At first, they were thought to be smithsonite, before analysis. They are simply unique for any willemite from anywhere, and they glow like blown glass when backlit. This nearly fist-sized, three-dimensional Willemite is complete all around and is almost a floater (almost complete 360 all around). It has dozens of sharp, complex, almost rounded crystals that could be considered as botryoids that average 1 cm across. Some small edge wear exists, as with all of the pieces from the pocket, but it is trivial in context and hard to see anyways. This is the largest example we have had since Ed David's cabinet sized piece in 2005, which is the largest I know of. So this ranks highly in size, for what seems to have been a small sized pocket. The whole piece is completely translucent to transparent and glows with any direct lighting in a cabinet! It is a remarkably large Willemite for Tsumeb and of a very rare style! We buy every one we can, but usually you only get a specimen in old collections of thousands of pieces, assembled in that time period. People buy and keep them... Rock Currier bought the specimen in 1987 from Dick Bideaux when he was trying to continue the mineral business that his father had started.