The Hidden Heroine of WWI: How Anna Coleman Ladd Restored Faces and Lives
- Daniel Holland
- Mar 17, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 8
On a grey morning in 1917, as the First World War ground on with relentless deathly efficiency, a small American woman crossed the Atlantic carrying little more than sculpting tools, notebooks, and a a great deal of skill. She was not a nurse, nor a doctor, nor a government official. Her name was Anna Coleman Ladd, and what she would do in a modest Paris studio would alter the daily lives of hundreds of men whose faces had been torn apart by modern warfare.
This is not a story of battlefield heroics or grand political decisions. It is a lee well known history, shaped in plaster and copper, rooted in patience, craft, and a profound understanding of human dignity.
From Bryn Mawr to Europe
Anna Coleman Watts was born in 1878 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, into a comfortable, intellectually curious household. Like many American women of means at the turn of the twentieth century, she was encouraged to cultivate refinement, but Anna’s interests went well beyond polite accomplishment. She showed an early aptitude for sculpture, a discipline that demanded physical endurance, anatomical understanding, and technical skill.
Her formal artistic education took her to Paris and Rome, where she studied under established sculptors and absorbed the European classical tradition at a time when sculpture was still a male dominated profession. These years shaped her technical confidence and gave her a cosmopolitan outlook that would later prove crucial.
After marrying Dr Maynard Ladd in 1905, Anna settled in Boston. There she established herself as a respected sculptor, producing portrait busts, fountains, and allegorical works. Her most famous early success, Triton Babies, was selected for exhibition at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. The playful bronze figures were widely praised and confirmed her professional standing.
Yet Anna was never solely defined by sculpture. She wrote fiction and plays that explored identity, morality, and social roles, including the novels Hieronymus Rides published in 1912 and The Candid Adventurer published in 1913. Her cultural connections were extensive. When the celebrated Italian actress Eleonora Duse agreed to sit for a portrait, Anna was one of only three artists ever permitted to sculpt her likeness, an indication of both trust and artistic reputation.
The War That Changed Faces
By the time the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Europe had already endured nearly three years of industrialised violence. Artillery barrages, machine guns, and trench warfare produced injuries on a scale and of a kind never previously encountered. Among the most devastating were facial wounds.
An estimated 21 million soldiers were wounded during the conflict, and hundreds of thousands sustained injuries to the face and jaw. Men returned from the front without noses, with shattered jaws, missing eyes, or extensive scarring that made eating, speaking, and breathing difficult. In France, they became known as gueules cassées, literally broken faces.
The physical damage was compounded by psychological trauma. These men were often hidden from public view, placed in separate hospital wards, or encouraged to remain indoors. At Cambridge Military Hospital in Sidcup, one surgeon, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, reportedly remarked that those without noses or jaws had little chance of returning to anything resembling normal life. In some British parks, benches were painted blue to signal that severely disfigured veterans might be present, a gesture intended as kindness but experienced by many as exclusion.
For soldiers already struggling with shell shock and survivor’s guilt, the loss of a recognisable face often felt like the loss of identity itself.
A Sculptor Takes Notice
Anna Coleman Ladd did not encounter this reality directly at first. Instead, she read about it. In late 1916, reports circulated of a British sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood, who had established what became known as the Tin Noses Shop at the Third London General Hospital. There, Wood used his sculptural skills to create thin metal masks that covered facial injuries, restoring a semblance of appearance for wounded soldiers.
For Anna, the idea resonated immediately. Sculpture, after all, was the art of form, surface, and expression. She understood faces not just as anatomy, but as the primary means through which people are recognised and understood.
Through her husband’s work with the American Red Cross, she secured permission to travel to France. Dr Maynard Ladd had been appointed director of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross in Toul, and his position opened doors that were otherwise firmly closed, particularly to women. Anna also received personal authorisation from General John J Pershing, an unusual exemption that reflected both the urgency of the need and the confidence placed in her abilities.
The Paris Studio for Portrait Masks
By late 1917, Anna had opened the Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris under the auspices of the American Red Cross. It was a small operation, but carefully conceived. Rather than treating soldiers as medical cases, she insisted on an atmosphere that preserved dignity. The studio was decorated with flowers, flags, and soft furnishings. Disfigurements were not discussed openly. Conversation focused on families, hobbies, and plans for the future.
Her process combined artistry and emerging medical technique. First, a plaster cast was taken directly from the soldier’s face, a delicate procedure that required patience and trust. From this cast, Anna sculpted the missing features in clay, referencing photographs taken before the injury when available. These sculpted forms were then cast in gutta percha, a natural latex like material, and electroplated with copper to produce a thin, lightweight mask.
The final stage was the most painstaking. With the mask held against the soldier’s face, Anna hand painted it to match skin tone exactly, adjusting colour under natural light. Human hair was added individually for eyebrows, moustaches, and eyelashes. The finished mask was secured using spectacles or fine wire and ribbon, designed to blend into everyday clothing.
The results were often startling. Contemporary observers, including Red Cross officials, referred to the transformations as miraculous, not because the injuries were erased, but because the men could once again enter public spaces without provoking shock or pity.
Restoring Identity
For the soldiers themselves, the masks offered something more profound than cosmetic improvement. Many had been avoiding mirrors, refusing visitors, or isolating themselves entirely. With a mask, they could attend social events, seek employment, or contemplate marriage.
One man wrote to Anna expressing gratitude in terms that reveal the stakes involved. He explained that the woman he loved no longer recoiled from his appearance, and that they planned to marry. The mask had not changed his past, but it had reopened the possibility of a future.
Between 1917 and 1919, Anna and her small team produced approximately 185 masks. Each was sold to veterans for 18 dollars, a nominal fee intended to preserve a sense of independence rather than charity. The true cost was borne by the American Red Cross, which funded materials and studio space.
The Limits of the Masks
It is important not to romanticise the work. The masks did not restore sensation or function. Eating and speaking often remained difficult, and prolonged wear could be uncomfortable. Some men chose to use them only for specific occasions, while others eventually abandoned them altogether.
Modern scholars have noted the unsettling quality of the masks. They exist at the intersection of medicine, craft, and performance, offering an appearance of wholeness while quietly acknowledging its absence. In this sense, they reflect the contradictions of post war Europe itself, striving to return to normality while carrying irreversible scars.
Yet within the context of the time, they represented one of the few available interventions for men otherwise condemned to social invisibility.
Recognition in France
Although Anna rarely sought attention, her work attracted professional admiration. Her masked veterans were presented twice to the French Surgical Society, where more than sixty surgeons examined the results. The collaboration between an artist and medical professionals was widely discussed, and her methods influenced later developments in reconstructive surgery and prosthetics.
In 1932, the French government awarded her the Légion d’Honneur Croix de Chevalier in recognition of her humanitarian contribution. She also received the Serbian Order of Saint Sava. These honours placed her among a small group of civilian women formally recognised for war related service.
Returning Home
After the war, American Red Cross funding was withdrawn, and the Paris studio closed at the end of 1919. Anna returned to the United States and resumed her sculptural career. One of her most striking later works was a war memorial commissioned by the American Legion in Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts. Unlike her earlier playful fountains, this piece depicted a decaying corpse entangled in barbed wire, a stark commentary on the cost of modern war.
In 1936, Anna and her husband retired to California. She continued to sculpt privately and remained intellectually active, though she rarely spoke publicly about her wartime work. She died in Santa Barbara on 1939.
A Legacy Rediscovered
Today, Anna Coleman Ladd occupies an unusual place in history. She does not fit neatly into narratives of military medicine or modern art, yet her work sits at the foundation of both. Her methods anticipated the field now known as anaplastology, which combines medical science with artistic skill to restore missing anatomy.
Her Triton Babies fountain continues to delight visitors in Boston Public Garden, and her name appears on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. More recently, museums and historians have begun to re examine her contribution, recognising that her masks were not merely prosthetics, but acts of social repair.
In a war defined by scale and destruction, Anna Coleman Ladd worked one face at a time. Her story reminds us that recovery is not only measured in treaties and reconstruction, but in the quiet, painstaking work of helping individuals be seen again.
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