Stefan Nicolescu pauses midsentence in his brief overview of the history of diamond cutting. A young museum visitor and his parent have just come into this small gallery room on the third floor of the Yale Peabody Museum, part of the Hall of Minerals, Earth, and Space. Diamonds and other gems are on display, some set into ornate jewelry and others unadorned.

Nicolescu, the collections manager for mineralogy and meteoritics at the Peabody, notices the boy checking out one of the displays, where an orange-brown diamond from South Africa sparkles alongside sapphires from Sri Lanka, emeralds from Colombia, and opals from Australia. Nicolescu pulls out a blue laser pointer from his pocket and demonstrates how some stones, when the laser hits them, illuminate as though glowing from within.

“It’s like turning on a light bulb in the crystal,” Nicolescu says.

This room, the Zucker Beesley Gem Room, was made possible thanks to a gift from Benjamin Zucker ’62 in honor of both his family and the family of C.R. “Cap” and Joan Beesley. Another display case contains different types of quartz, including amethyst, citrine, and smoky quartz, all on loan from the Beesleys.

“Quartz is from Minecraft,” the boy observes, referencing the popular online game.

Nicolescu can’t help enthusing to visitors of all ages about the gems and minerals at the Peabody. After all, they are some of the most impressive specimens on display for the public anywhere in the world, according to prominent gem and mineral collectors.

In terms of sheer number and size of the exhibit halls, it’s hard for the Peabody to compete with museums like the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But quality-wise, the Peabody punches well above its weight.

“These are top quality specimens,” Nicolescu says. “There are a few other collections or exhibits putting similarly high-quality minerals on display in the world. But there aren’t many.”

Metamorphic Gifts

While the Peabody purchases some of its own specimens (including some negotiated by Beesley on behalf of the museum), many of the most spectacular pieces on display in the Hall of Earth, Minerals, and Space and the adjoining David Friend Hall are either loans or gifts from collectors, including David Friend ’69, Cap and Joan Beesley, and Benjamin Zucker. The late Barry Yampol, the Yampol Family, and The Mineral Trust are responsible for many of the minerals currently displayed in David Friend Hall, from thin, fan-like California gold to smooth, rounded chalcedony from Brazil. The collection from the Yampol Family and The Mineral Trust has been granted to the museum for five years, significantly longer than previous loans on display in the Peabody’s mineral galleries.

“This is such a unique collection,” Nicolescu says. “It’s worth having it here for a long time.”
Sometimes, Nicolescu says, these longer-term loans “metamorphose” into permanent donations to the museum. That’s the case for several specimens on display, including a sandstone concretion and large amethyst geode from Friend, as well as jewelry pieces showing off different historical gem cuts from Zucker.

Zucker, a member of the Peabody Leadership Council and the museum’s Mineral Advisory Board, hopes his gifts inspire museum visitors. “Almost every director of the Peabody was brought here as a kid, or to another natural history museum,” he notes. “You can dream of becoming a scientist when you come here.”

Inspiring Awe

David Friend Hall is named in recognition of Friend’s generous donations supporting the hall’s renovation in 2016. He wanted to help display the museum’s gems and minerals so they would spark the same kind of awe as the museum’s better-known exhibits, such as the fossils in the Coleman P. Burke Hall of Dinosaurs.

“A room full of old-fashioned cases with thousands of little boring mineral specimens just didn’t serve the public,” Friend says. “Visitors gravitate toward the big, impressive, spectacular things, like the 80-foot Brontosaurus. It inspires them to want to learn, as opposed to having someone try to teach them.”

Friend envisioned a gallery with minimal text on the display labels, which he says can often feel too didactic. He’s helping the museum develop and roll out an app called Amuse, which can present information more engagingly, such as through videos or interactive trivia.

The success of the 2016 mineral hall renovation helped pave the way for the museum’s total renovation, which was completed earlier this year.

“David Friend’s contribution, and David Friend Hall, changed the trajectory of what’s happening at the Peabody,” says David Skelly, the director of the Peabody. “It provided a blueprint for the renovation of the rest of the museum.”

Global Marvels, Local Treasures

The pieces displayed on the Peabody’s third floor show the remarkable range and diversity of the forms that minerals can take. In David Friend Hall, seven impressively large pieces are focal points. The sandstone concretion gifted by Friend looks like it’s made of piled dough rather than crystals. A so-called “desert rose,” consisting of flat, intersecting gypsum crystals, comes from Mexico; a nest of impossibly delicate aragonite crystals was found in China.

Visitors can also discover smaller examples of what the Earth’s natural processes can render: small mounds of dioptase that look like vibrant green mold paired with orange wulfenite, from Arizona; a natural corkscrew of silver from Kazakhstan; a single emerald crystal from Colombia surrounded by milky calcite.

Elsewhere, a display showcases local pieces from Connecticut, such as a deep purple fluorapatite and interlocking silvery crystals of chalcocite from a copper mine in Bristol.

Inner Light

Visitors to the museum’s gem and mineral exhibits have the sense of spelunking deep in the recesses of the Earth, as if they were shining headlamps on freshly discovered splendors. The space is intentionally dark, says Friend, with the minerals and gems on display illuminated to best exhibit their remarkable colors, properties, and textures. 

To maximize the visual impact of the minerals, much consideration was given to how they are lit, says Beesley, the chair of the Peabody Museum Mineral Advisory Board and a member of the Peabody Leadership Council. He credits longtime Peabody exhibit designer Laura Friedman with understanding how lighting these specimens is different from lighting most other objects and artifacts that the museum displays.

“Lighting specimens is one thing; lighting gems and minerals is significantly different,” Beesley says.

Friedman, working with lighting design firm Lightswitch, sought to get as much out of every individual piece as possible.

“It was both an exciting and difficult challenge,” she says. “Some specimens look like dull, dead rock until they’re lit from underneath.” The first thing visitors encounter when entering Friend Hall is a huge quartz crystal from Namibia. It glows like a beacon as though from an inner fire; the lights themselves are invisible to visitors.

Some minerals also glow under fluorescent light. A specialized case in the hall shows off examples like a fluorapatite that transforms from a pale, dull off-white into vivid, bright yellow when an ultraviolet light is turned on.

With training in sculpture and dance, Friedman considered not just how to illuminate the gems and minerals but also how best to group them so they would complement each other.

“We put specimens together that offset each other in terms of texture or color or form, almost like a little dance,” she says. “In these groupings, you see the beauty of each piece because they’re different from each other, but there’s a harmony among them.”

She also consulted with Nicolescu and Yampol as to which minerals ought to be grouped together based on how they are formed. The goal of the hall is to wow visitors and also to help them learn about geology; museum displays often must balance aesthetic and educational considerations.

“‘Speak to the Earth, and it will teach you,’” Zucker says, quoting from the Book of Job. “Every moment that you have in your life, you can be either learning or teaching or both. That’s what these gems have done for me, that’s what Yale did for me, and that’s what I’m hoping for the future of the Peabody Museum.”