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

Product Information

Wood and his colleagues would painstakingly recreate the patient’s original appearance from remaining features and pre-injury photographs. An official war artist for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lobley portrays individual faces, some of them visibly scarred. In fact, Sidcup, England, home to a soldiers’ hospital, painted its public benches blue to warn townspeople that any man sitting on one would be distressing to view. 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. While extensive surgery and complex skin grafts were options for some, many soldiers’ facial injuries far surpassed even the best surgeon’s ability.

The daughter of well-to-do Bryn Mawr socialites, Anna Coleman Ladd was educated in Paris and Rome, where she studied neoclassical sculpture. 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. 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. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” character Richard Harrow portrayed one of the war veterans who came home with “broken faces.At 26 she married a physician from Boston, where she continued her work, specializing in public art and portrait busts. Harrow’s character was based upon one of those “men with the broken faces” who may well have sought the help of Anna Coleman Ladd. 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.

But by 1920, the American Red Cross could no longer fund her studio, and it closed despite each mask only lasting a few years.Ladd’s work was greatly appreciated by both the wounded soldiers and the American and French military organizations. When we think of The Great War, images of gas masks, barbed wire, trenches and machine guns come to mind.

In Gaston Leroux’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’, the Phantom‘s disguises include a “long, thin, and transparent” nose and another made of pasteboard with a moustache attached. 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. Facial masks, patches and artificial noses had been made for centuries to cover the disfiguring injuries caused by disease and combat. Tonks never thought of these intimate drawings as ‘war art’, but they portray the violence of war – and the transformative impact of injury – in a way that still has the power to shock.One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin.

But her real fame came later in life through a much more gruesome — but compassionate — form of art. 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.Facial injury was rarely depicted in the illustrated press and almost never in official war art or propaganda. Though short-lived, the portrait mask experiment shows facial injury and repair being collectively managed, by surgeons and artists, in ways that challenge our assumptions about the purpose of both science and art. The war memorials and warrior figures she created inevitably featured sharp-jawed soldiers with perfect features some critics described as mask-like. Suzannah Biernoff is a Reader in Visual Culture in the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Philadelphia-born Anna Coleman Ladd is best known for her neoclassical portrait busts and bronze sculptures of sprites frolicking in public fountains.