Anna Coleman Ladd

Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (1878 – June 3, 1939) was an American sculptress in Manchester, Massachusetts, who devoted her time throughout World War I to soldiers who were disfigured.

Anna Coleman Watts was born in Philadelphia and educated in Europe, where she studied sculpture in Paris and Rome. She moved to Boston in 1905 when she married Dr. Maynard Ladd, and there studied with Bela Pratt for three years at the Boston Museum School. Her "Triton Babies" piece was shown at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. (It is now a fountain sculpture in the Boston Public Garden.) In 1916 she was a founder of the Guild of Boston Artists, where she held a one-woman show.

In late 1917, in Paris, Ladd founded the American Red Cross "Studio for Portrait-Masks" to provide cosmetic masks to be worn by men who had been badly disfigured in World War I. Her services earned her the Légion d'Honneur Crois de Chevalier and the Serbian Order of Saint Sava. [ [http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/laddanna.htm A Finding Aid to the Anna Coleman Ladd Papers, 1881-1950, in the Archives of American Art ] ]

After World War I, she depicted a decayed corpse on a barbed wire fence for a war memorial commissioned by the Manchester-by-the-Sea American Legion. In 1936 Ladd retired with her husband to California, where she died in 1939.

Ladd's prosthetic work

Soldiers would come to Ladd's studio to have a cast made of their face and their features sculpted onto clay or plasticine. This form was then used to constuct the prosthetic piece from extremely thin galvanized copper. The metal was painted to resemble the recipient's skin, and the prosthesis was donned with strings or eyeglasses for retention much like the prothetics created in Francis Derwent Wood's "Tin Noses Shop". [ [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/mask.html Smithsonian Magazine | History & Archaeology | Faces of War ] ]

The present day correlation to the work of Ladd is the field of anaplastology. Anaplastology is the art and science of restoring absent or malformed anatomy through artificial means. In the Smithsonian Magazine February 2007 article, "Rivaling Nature" - Erin Donaldson, an anaplastologist in Beverly, MA, was interviewed by Caroline Alexander for a present day perspective on the purpose and benefits of facial prosthetics for patients in civilian sectors as well as soldiers returning from the current conflict in Iraq. The public's treatment of soldiers with facial differences has changed little since Ladd's time.

Notes

References

* Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
* [http://www.bwht.org/winter2003_2.html Anna Coleman Ladd (1878-1939), by Karen Tenney-Loring]
* Alexander, Caroline (2007). "Faces of War". "Smithsonian", February 2007, pp. 72-80.

External links

* [http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/laddanna.htm Anna Coleman Ladd Papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art]