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.

Anna Coleman Watts was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and educated in Europe, where she studied sculpture in Paris and Rome.

[1] 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.

Anna stayed on the homefront, but, in her search for ways to help the war effort, she learned about the work of Francis Derwent Wood in London.

[2] Ladd founded the American Red Cross "Studio for Portrait-Masks" to provide cosmetic masks to be worn by men who had been badly disfigured in World War I.

The prosthesis was attached to the face by strings or eyeglasses as the prosthetics created in Francis Derwent Wood's "Tin Noses Shop" were.