The Tin Nose Shop: a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Recommended Read

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These strange, exquisite artefacts are an object lesson in how the war-damaged face was understood at the time as a psychological and social wound. Today, none of Ladd’s prosthetic masks are known to survive except a small cheek prosthesis included in a 2016 exhibition in England. Ladd’s work was greatly appreciated by both the wounded soldiers and the American and French military organizations. Little more than a thin curve of skin, it fails to do justice to Ladd’s artistry and her legacy in restoring self-respect and honor to those World War I soldiers with the “broken faces,” as captured in one patient’s letter to her: “The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had the right to do.

While some masks were full-face, most covered just those areas that were damaged — perhaps a chin and one cheek, or a nose and an eye. With her skills and artistic training, Ladd, age 39 at the time and living in Paris, believed she could do the same for the men for whom masks were the last resort. After a soldier had recuperated from his initial injury and what were often multiple surgeries to reconstruct his face, plaster casts were made of the face, from which clay or plasticine casts were then made that formed the basis of each mask.It wasn’t unusual for new patients making their way to Ladd’s Parisian studio to find themselves in rooms and hallways lined with row after row of plaster casts and masks in progress. When we think of The Great War, images of gas masks, barbed wire, trenches and machine guns come to mind.

The daughter of well-to-do Bryn Mawr socialites, Anna Coleman Ladd was educated in Paris and Rome, where she studied neoclassical sculpture. Over the course of two years, Ladd’s studio produced 185 masks — a number that pales compared to World War I’s estimated 20,000 facial casualties.

There was a regular Tuesday tea, and at any one time there might be half a dozen visitors: the men we see in the photographs and film, but also surgeons and curious members of the public. While extensive surgery and complex skin grafts were options for some, many soldiers’ facial injuries far surpassed even the best surgeon’s ability. Henry Tonks was a surgeon before his success as an artist and instructor at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and his pastel studies of plastic surgeon Harold Gillies’ patients before and after reconstructive surgery lie somewhere between medical illustration and portraiture.

If the mask included a restoration of the patient’s mouth, Ladd modeled the lips open just enough to allow for a cigarette holder.Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction.