|
|
Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
Sculptures
Anna Coleman Watts was born in Philadelphia and educated in Europe, where she studied sculpture in Paris and Rome. She moved to Boston in 1905 when she married Dr. Maynard Ladd, and there studied with Bela Pratt for three years at the Boston Museum School. Her Triton Babies piece was shown at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. (It is now a fountain sculpture in the Boston Public Garden.) In 1916 she was a founder of the Guild of Boston Artists, where she held a one-woman show. She completed other works with mythological characters,like the satyrs pictured below, and these pieces continue to surface and are sold in auctions today.[1] "Forest Pan"; 1907; Bronze; 18 3/4" high [1] "Untitled" (Satyr and Sleeping Nude); Bronze; 10 1/8" high[1] Ladd challenged herself on many artistic fronts and wrote two books, Hieronymus Rides, based on a medieval romance she worked on for years, and The Candid Adventurer, a sendup of Boston society in 1913. She also wrote at least two unproduced plays, one of which incorporated the story of a female sculptor who goes to war. She devoted herself to portraiture and was well-regarded. Her portrait of Eleanora Duse was one of only three that the actress ever allowed. I In late 1917, in Paris, 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. Her services earned her the Légion d'Honneur Crois de Chevalier and the Serbian Order of Saint Sava.[2] After World War I, she depicted a decayed corpse on a barbed wire fence for a war memorial commissioned by the Manchester-by-the-Sea American Legion. In 1936, Ladd retired with her husband to California, where she died in 1939. Ladd's prosthetic work Soldiers would come 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 to resemble the recipient's skin, and the prosthesis was donned with strings or eyeglasses for retention much like the prostheticS created in Francis Derwent Wood's "Tin Noses Shop".[3] The present day correlation to the work of Ladd is the field of anaplastology. Anaplastology is the art and science of restoring absent or malformed anatomy through artificial means. In the Smithsonian magazine February 2007 article, "Rivaling Nature" - Erin Donaldson, an anaplastologist in Beverly, MA, was interviewed by Caroline Alexander for a present day perspective on the purpose and benefits of facial prosthetics for patients in civilian sectors as well as soldiers returning from the current conflict in Iraq. The public's treatment of soldiers with facial differences has changed little since Ladd's time. Notes 1. ^ a b c "Anna Coleman Ladd". Fine Art May 2007. Rago Arts and Auction Center. http://www.ragoarts.com/results/?p=search&q=anna+coleman+ladd.
* Anna Coleman Ladd papers, 1881-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ==--==--==
|
==++==++== |
