"Victorious Tiger" Carved Tiger's Eye Sculpture — L'Aquart × Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio

A tiger carved from a single whole piece of tiger's eye, its chatoyant bands running with the animal's own stripes. One of one.

The object

"Victorious Tiger" is a hand-carved table sculpture worked from one solid piece of tiger's eye. The stone is named for the animal, and the animal here is named for the stone: the carver has oriented the material so its silken bands of light fall as the big cat's striped coat, the body seeming to gather and release the light as it turns.

The stone

Tiger's eye is a chatoyant quartz — a pseudomorph after crocidolite, in which fibrous mineral has been replaced by silica while preserving the parallel fiber structure that produces chatoyancy: a living band of reflected light that slides across the surface as the stone moves. Its golden-brown color comes from iron oxide formed during that replacement. It registers 7 on the Mohs scale, and a whole piece large and sound enough to carve a crouching tiger is far from common.

The subject

Across cultures the tiger stands for power, courage and victory — guardian and sovereign of the wild, especially in the iconography of Asia. Carved from a stone that appears to watch and glow, the emblem gains a second life.

The artist

Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary sculptor and creative director of L'Aquart, heir to a family atelier whose tradition reaches back to 1968. An engineer by training, he gave the bench what engineering could not match; his carved works are held in museum collections worldwide, and since 2010 he has collaborated with S.T. Dupont on Haute Création pieces. His practice insists on harmony between lapidary carving, metalwork and structural planning — and on refusing difficulty as a reason not to proceed.

Offered by

Surround Art & Diamonds — North American representative of L'Aquart — presents this work as a singular object at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft and collecting, with nearly a decade placing Quispe Aparicio's sculptures in private collections across the United States and Europe.

• Material: Tiger's eye (single whole piece)
• Dimensions: 25 × 12 × 20 cm (9.8 × 4.7 × 7.9 in)
• Year: 2016
• Artwork origin: Peru
• Edition: Unique, one of one
• Status: In hand, available