Anna Coleman Ladd
Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (July 15, 1878 – June 3, 1939) was an American sculptor in Massachusetts who devoted her time and skills throughout World War I to designing prosthetics for soldiers who were disfigured from injuries received in combat.
Biography
Anna Coleman Watts was born in
Her
Ladd challenged herself on many artistic fronts and wrote two books, The Joyous History of Hieronymus the Anonymous (1905), based on a medieval romance she worked on for years and The Candid Adventurer (1913), a sendup of Boston society. She also wrote two unproduced plays; one of which incorporated the story of a female sculptor who goes to war.
She devoted herself to portraiture and her work was well regarded. Her portrait of
After
Her sculpture Triton Babies is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.[4]
Prosthetic work
Soldiers came 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 construct the prosthetic piece from extremely thin galvanized copper. The metal was painted with hard enamel to resemble the recipient's skin tone. Ladd used real hair to create the eyelashes, eyebrows and mustaches. The prosthesis was attached to the face by strings or eyeglasses as the prosthetics created in Francis Derwent Wood's "Tin Noses Shop" were.[2][5]
In 1932, the French Government honored her as a Knight (Chevalier) of the Legion of Honour, in recognition of the work she'd done.[6]
Ladd’s work is now called anaplastology. Anaplastology is the art, craft, and science of restoring absent or malformed anatomy through artificial means.
References
- ^ "Anna Coleman Ladd". Fine Art May 2007. Rago Arts and Auction Center. Archived from the original on 2011-07-15. Retrieved 2009-07-26.
- ^ a b "Faces of War". Smithsonian Magazine.
- ^ "A Finding Aid to the Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881-1950 | Digitized Collection". www.aaa.si.edu.
- ^ "Back Bay East". Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
- ^ "Women in World War I - Anna Coleman Ladd". National Museum of American History. Smithsonian. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
- ^ Khazan, Olga (4 August 2014). "Masks: The Face Transplants of World War I". The Atlantic. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- Sources
- Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Anna Coleman Ladd (1878–1939), by Karen Tenney-Loring
- Alexander, Caroline (2007). "Faces of War". Smithsonian, February 2007, pp. 72–80.