GEORGE FREDERICK KUNZ

George Frederick Kunz is known as “the greatest American gemologist of all time.” He served as Tiffany and Company’s chief gemologist from 1879 until his death in 1932. Though he received some training at Cooper Union College in lower Manhattan, Kunz never finished his schooling and is considered mostly self-taught. Thanks to his vision, Tiffany and Company became famous for its use of unusual colored stones.

As Kunz recalled in an interview with the Saturday Post. In those early days, as I have said, no so-called fancy stones were on sale in any jewelry store in the country; one could scarcely find them in a lapidary's shop, yet, reviewing those that I had gathered, it seemed to me that many ladies, even those who could afford the gesture of diamond tiara and pearl choker, would be happy to array themselves in the endless gorgeous colors of these unexploited gems. As I looked over a collection of them, with the sunlight imprisoned in the sea-green depths of the tourmaline, lapping at the facets of the watery-blue aquamarine, flooding the blood-red cup of the garnet, glancing from the ice-blue edges of the beryl, melting in the misty nebula of the moonstone, entangled in the fringes of the moss agate, brilliantly concentrated in the metallic zircon, forming a milky star in the heart of the illusive star sapphire-bow, I thought, could a woman ever resist their appeal?

Indeed, as time would tell, women could not resist. Following Tiffany’s lead, other American and European jewelers incorporated a more diverse range of colored stones into their design repertoire. Demand soared. Kunz was awarded numerous honorary degrees and published over 300 articles and numerous of books on gemstones. With his help, Tiffany was able to amass a truly impressive collection of gems, including a 331-carat Siberian aquamarine, rare conch pearls, and large Hungarian opals—to name a few. Some of his specimens remain part of the US national collection in the American Museum of Natural History. Kunz is also famous for discovering a new variety of pink spodumene, which was subsequently named after him: Kunzite.