Alan LeQuire

Photography by Dean Dixon

Biography by Madison Smartt Bell

Published by LeQuire Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee 2011

50 pages with over 60 gorgeous images

 flat spine paperback, 50 pages with over 60 gorgeous images

Terra cotta is the term for fired clay, literally meaning, "cooked earth." There are examples in early art from as as far back as 3,000 B.C. Continually since, artists have crated in clay, and collectors, including Baron Thibon and the Goncourt brothers, have passionately assembled collections of terra cotta sculptures, citing their delicacy and, "the modeling of dreams, [with] an almost immaterial beauty." (Goncourt, La Maison d'un Artiste. 2 vols. Paris, 1881 pp. 166-67.) In 1764 Johann Joachim Winkelmann wrote in The History of Ancient Art, "Modeling in clay is to the sculptor what drawing is to the painter. In the soft material, and on paper, the genius of the artist is seen in its utmost purity and truth."