SCULPTOR ANNA COLEMAN LADD

On the day after Christmas in 1920, a French mailman and veteran of World War I wrote an American woman named Anna Coleman Ladd to thank her for what she had done for him during the war.

Ladd knew the veteran, Charles Victor, who had been wounded in the face by a hand grenade in 1915. She had two photos of him.

In one, he is sitting in a chair, wearing his uniform and military medals. He has large ears and a shock of dark hair, parted on the side. But the lower half of his face is mutilated. Most of his nose and lips are gone, and his mouth looks crooked and rearranged.

In the second photo, he is sitting in the same chair. But now he is wearing glasses and a jaunty mustache, and there is no sign of injury.

What Ladd had done for Victor was not plastic surgery.

She was a sculptor. And he was one of the scores of disfigured French and American soldiers for whom she had made exquisite metal masks to conceal their war injuries.

With the start this summer of the centennial of World War I (1914-18) and increased interest from researchers, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art has posted a cache of Ladd’s papers online.

The collection includes letters, scrapbooks, photos and notebooks from Ladd’s long career as a sculptor. And it includes files and photos from her short but fascinating work as director of the Red Cross mask-making studio in Paris.

“She was a neoclassical sculptor,” said David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber professor of art at Wake Forest University.

“She was very interested in principles of ancient art, the sort of beautiful serene face,” he said. “And she gives these men .?.?. this almost unreal serenity.”

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