Anna Coleman Ladd

Anna Coleman Ladd (nee Watts), an accomplished American sculptor from Manchester, Massachusetts, began working for the Red Cross in the U.S. during the first world war. 

Hoping to more usefully help the war effort, she travelled to London to work with Sculptor Francis Derwent Wood whom she had heard was making life-like masks for soldiers with devastating facial injuries. This was an era where reconstructive facial surgery was developing and sparsely available. Gaining special permission from General Pershing to go to France, she established her Studio for Portrait Masks, administered by the American Red Cross, in Paris in late 1917 to provide facial prostheses for soldiers. This work earnt her the Legion d’Honneur.

Born near Philadelphia she had studied Sculpture in Paris and Rome, before moving back to Boston in 1905. She married Dr Maynard Ladd in Salisbury, England, before moving back to Boston and studying at the Boston Museum School under Bela Lyon Pratt.

Even before the First Word War, Ladd was an accomplished sculptor, producing a work called “Triton Babies” in 1915, later turned into a fountain which now sits in Boston Public Garden.

She went on to found the Guild of Boston Artists in 1916. After world war one she also produced an evocative war memorial sculpture featuring a corpse on barbed wire for the community of Manchester-by-the -Sea. Not limiting herself to one artistic genre, she also produced portraits, two books and two unproduced plays. Ladd retired in 1936, going to live with her husband in California, where she died in 1939.

Watch this video about Anna Coleman Ladd (not BAPRAS)