Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (American, 1878 to 1939)
Anna Coleman Watts Ladd was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, She studied in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Charles Grafly and in France with Auguste Rodin. She actively exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic, garnering recognition for her portrait busts, relief panels and soldiers monuments. In France during World War I, she made life masks of the disfigured soldiers she met at the American Red Cross hospital run by her physician husband, for which she was awarded the Legion d’honneur.
Ladd was a member of the National Sculpture Society, the Guild of Boston Artists, the Copley Society, the North Shore Art Association and the San Diego Art Association. Her sculpture is in the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. Her public works in Massachusetts include a fountain in the Boston Public Gardens and memorials in Beverly, Harvard and Brookline.
Information courtesy of Freeman’s, December 2006.