Anna Coleman Ladd

Fountain sculpture of Triton babies in Boston Public Garden

Anna Coleman Ladd (born July 15, 1878 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † June 3, 1939 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American sculptor and prosthodontist.

life and work

Ladd studied sculpture in Paris and Rome and moved to Boston in 1905 , where she married the doctor Maynard Ladd . There she studied with the sculptor Bela Pratt at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts . Her sculpture Triton Babies was shown at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and is now a fountain sculpture in the Boston Public Garden. In 1914 she was a founding member of the Guild of Boston Artists and exhibited in both the opening show and the following traveling exhibition. She also devoted herself to portrait painting and created a portrait of the actress Eleonora Duse as one of only three she had ever admitted. In 1917, the art critic C. Lewis Hind made them aware of an article by Francis Derwent Wood . Wood was an artist by profession and had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps . After seeing the brutally disfigured men brought back from the war trenches to be treated by London-based surgeon Harold Gillies , he opened the face masks department at Third London General Hospital, soon to be informally known as the "Tin Noses Shop ”became known. In 1917 Ladd moved to France with her husband, who was to head the American Red Cross Children's Office in Toul . After meeting Wood, Ladd founded the American Red Cross "Studio for Portrait-Masks" in Paris to make masks for men who had been badly disfigured in the First World War. Although masks had been worn by people with deformities for centuries, no one had attempted to make them on this scale before. It was estimated that 3,000 French soldiers needed such help. To visit Ladd, they needed a letter of recommendation from the Red Cross. At the beginning she created a plaster mask to make a copy of the face and to make an impression from gutta-percha . This form was then used to construct the prosthetic part from extremely thin galvanized copper . The metal has been painted with hard enamel to match the recipient's skin tone. The missing or distorted features were designed using reference photos from before the war. The mask ranged from a missing nose to a completely destroyed part of the face, depending on the extent of the damage. She made a mustache out of foil and used human hair for her eyebrows and eyelashes. The mask was usually attached to glasses that were hooked over the ears. With her 4 employees, she made about nine masks a month. After the war ended, she returned to Boston after 11 months to continue her sculpting career. In 1932 she was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honor for her military service . In the years after the war she gave lectures where she shared her experiences with making these masks. She received many letters from men thanking her for making them more comfortable with the way she looked. However, no comprehensive study was ever conducted to determine how the masks performed. In 1936 she moved to California with her husband, where she died in 1939. Her daughter Gabriella May Ladd married Henry Dwight Sedgwick , the great-grandfather of actress Kyra Sedgwick , in 1953 .

Books

• Anna Coleman Ladd: The Candid Adventurer, 2018, ISBN 978-0331227659
• Anna Coleman Ladd: Hieronymus rides: episodes in the life of a knight and jester at the court of Maximilian, King of the Romans, 1912

literature

• Anna Coleman Ladd: The Work of Anna Coleman Ladd ..., 2012, ISBN 978-1278148489
• David M. Lubin, "Masks, Mutilation, and Modernity: Anna Coleman Ladd and the First World War," Archives of American Art Journal 47, 2008
• Kelly Quinn: "Anna Coleman Ladd: an artist's contributions to World War I," Archives of American Art Blog, 2014.

Web links

Commons : Anna Coleman Ladd  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Reconstructing History: Anna Coleman Ladd, the Mask Artist of World War I.
• Faces of War
• This woman 'restored' the faces of WWI veterans and changed their lives
• Faces of War
• Anna Coleman Ladd's Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris