Anna Coleman Watts was born on July 15, 1878 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She studied sculpture in Paris and Rome. Her first important work was called “Triton’s Babies”. In was displayed at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. It is now part of a fountain in Boston. She sculpted mainly mythological characters. She also did portrait busts. She became a fixture in Boston society. When WWI began, she went to England to work with Francis Wood. Wood was a pioneer in the making of masks for facially deformed soldiers. His work was necessitated by the horrible wounds caused by machine guns and artillery shrapnel. Wood and Ladd improved the technique. She got permission from Gen. John Pershing to work near the front as part of the Red Cross. She worked at the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department in Paris. British soldiers called it the “Tin Noses Shop”. She founded the American Red Cross’ “Studio for Portrait Masks”. Casts were made of the face which were converted into clay or plasticine. Then a very thin galvanized copper. This was painted with enamel while the patient wore the mask. Real hair was used for facial hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. The mask would be held on usually by glasses. Unfortunately, the 185 masks that Ladd produced was far from the estimated 20,000 facial injuries in the war. After the war, she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur Croix de Chevalier. Today, the making of masks to restore missing or malformed anatomy is called anaplastology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Coleman_Ladd
https://www.si.edu/spotlight/women-in-wwi/anna-coleman-ladd
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/faces-of-war-145799854/
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