Anna Coleman Ladd

Who was Anna Coleman Ladd?

Anna Coleman Watts Ladd was an American sculptor in Manchester, Massachusetts, who devoted her time throughout World War I to soldiers, who were disfigured.

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. In 1914, she was founding member of the Guild of Boston Artists and exhibited in both the opening show and the traveling exhibition that followed and where later 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.

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.