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

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One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin. 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. Nicholls and Wood were most likely unaware of this longer history of facial repair, but they would have been attuned to the stigma of the missing or sunken nose associated with syphilis.

Philadelphia-born Anna Coleman Ladd is best known for her neoclassical portrait busts and bronze sculptures of sprites frolicking in public fountains. In a silent film commissioned by the American Red Cross, the studio at 70 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs comes to life.Suzannah Biernoff is a Reader in Visual Culture in the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Funded and administered by the American Red Cross, it was a restful place where she and four assistants often worked for weeks to produce a single prosthetic mask.

The daughter of well-to-do Bryn Mawr socialites, Anna Coleman Ladd was educated in Paris and Rome, where she studied neoclassical sculpture. When we think of The Great War, images of gas masks, barbed wire, trenches and machine guns come to mind. In late 1917, Anna Coleman Ladd met Francis Derwent Wood, a British sculptor and founder of the 3rd London General Hospital’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department. After all, this was a time when the most advanced cosmetic surgical procedure was the repair of a cleft lip. 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.

An official war artist for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lobley portrays individual faces, some of them visibly scarred. While extensive surgery and complex skin grafts were options for some, many soldiers’ facial injuries far surpassed even the best surgeon’s ability. But her greatest work — and her most important legacy — was restoring the self-respect, honor and dignity to World War I veterans known by the French as “the men with the broken faces. Eyebrows were painted on hair by hair and eyelashes of thin metallic foil were tinted, curled and soldered in place. 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.

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. Today, none of Ladd’s prosthetic masks are known to survive except a small cheek prosthesis included in a 2016 exhibition in England. Ladd made it her mission to fashion masks so those soldiers could once again appear in public without shocking and being subjected to the horrified stares of passersby. It was painstaking detailed and painted to match the soldier’s skin color, often while the man was wearing the mask, so the tone would work in sunny and cloudy weather, even capturing the bluish tinge of a man’s freshly-shaved cheeks. Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction.

In 1932 she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor — the highest French decoration and among the most famous in the world. Ladd and her associates took over a large fifth-floor artist’s studio in the Latin Quarter: a bright, high-ceilinged room decorated with posters, flowers and an American flag. 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. Maynard Ladd, was appointed to a post as medical advisor to the American Red Cross at the French front lines. His compatriots seem just as comfortable in the company of Ladd’s assistants, nodding and chatting while the sculptors make adjustments.