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Anna Coleman Ladd (1878-1939) by Karen Tenney-Loring
Philadelphia born and European educated, Anna Coleman (Watts) Ladd moved to Boston in 1905 when she married Dr. Maynard Ladd. Working in her studio at 270 Clarendon Street, she became one of the city’s most prolific sculptors, creating fountain pieces, portrait busts, memorials, and reliefs in addition to authoring two books, lecturing and instructing. Her ambition was “to work for all outdoors, to produce sculpture to be placed on street corners, on walks, on open roads” and “to express the joy and youth and dreams of human nature.” Today in the Boston Public Garden, we see these ambitions realized in Ladd’s Triton Babies fountain sculpture, one of four bronze sculptures, all done by Boston area women, in the Public Garden.       By the time Ladd was educated in France, art, along with nursing, teaching and writing, had become acceptable professions for women. Ladd chose art and began sculpting in her early twenties in Paris and Rome. When she moved to Boston, she continued more formal studies with Bela Pratt who instituted regular classes in sculpture modeling at the Boston Museum School. Prior to Pratt’s appointment there were few opportunities for women in Boston to learn modeling. Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), an early Boston sculptress who became inter-nationally recognized, was not allowed to study anatomy in Boston and went to St. Louis to do so at Missouri Medical College.      Ladd launched her career after three years at the Museum School. She was among a number of excellent women sculptors at the time who brought a new vitality to the field. Small bronzes were particularly profitable for women and an area where they were able to gain commissions. The delightful Triton Babies was one of five fountain pieces and seven other works she exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. One of the pieces, Wind and Spray, a circle of nude females and males dancing in a ring of waves, was placed prominently in front of the Palace of Fine Arts. When it was later displayed at a show in the Boston Public Garden, the nudity caused such a fuss that it was withdrawn.      The Triton Babies sculpture of two naked children, however, did not offend Bostonians and became a permanent feature in the Public Garden. Mrs. Boylston Beal bought the sculpture and placed it across the street from her home at Beacon and Arlington Streets. It was moved to its present location in 1924. The somewhat attenuated figures of the boy and girl and liveliness of the ensemble are typical of Ladd’s style.	Both a humanist and romantic realist, her lyrical pieces break away from the more formal neo-classical, academic sculptural style of the previous century. Ladd’s bronze fountain sculpture of St. Francis is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts and her portrait bust of Boston socialite Maria de Acosta Sargent is at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.      Prolific and hard-working, she was a founder of the Guild of Boston Artists where she held a one-woman show in 1916, described in the Boston Evening Transcript: “The forty or more pieces of sculpture by Ms. Anna Coleman Ladd …indicate the indefatigable activity of the artist…She is evidently full of ideas for symbolic, allegorical and imaginative sculpture. She has a very interesting vein of fancy which has found an outlet in the garden and fountain bronzes…” In addition to shows in Boston, Ladd had numerous shows in New York, Washington, D. C. and Philadelphia.      Ladd’s most unusual contri-bution was made during World War I. In 1917 she accompanied her husband to France where both of them served in the American Red Cross (ARC). He ran a hospital and she opened a studio known as ARC Portrait Studio where she made “new faces” for disfigured soldiers. These “portrait masks” were made of thin copper and enameled in skin tones to provide a cosmetic screen for those awaiting reconstructive surgery. In some cases, because plastic surgery was not advanced enough at the time, these masks served as a permanent cosmetic device. In total she made 60 masks and trained others to continue her work. For these efforts she was awarded the French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.      Ladd’s work following the war was more serious, lacking the lyricism and gaiety of her earlier pieces, and her style changed, becoming more simple and modernist. In a war memorial commissioned by the Manchester-by-the-Sea American Legion she depicts a decayed corpse of a soldier on a barbed wire fence in one of the memorial’s two medallions. In a booklet on her work which she put together in 1920, the first photo is of a sculpture entitled Peace. She says, “Peace is not represented as a woman with a dove and an olive branch, but as the only power capable of crushing and controlling the brute, War, that is crushing the youth of the world.”      In 1936, Ladd retired with her husband to California, where she died in 1939. The headline of her New York Times obituary reads as a quick synopsis of her life: “Mrs. Anna C. Ladd, Sculptor, is Dead/Rebuilder of Soldiers’ Faces/Was Made Legion of Honor Chevalier of France/Also Wrote Two Novels/Wife of Pediatrist/Had Designed Memorials and Portraits of Actresses.”      Karen Tenney-Loring is working on a project on the history of decorative waterworks in Boston’s public spaces.
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