Clare, you’re in the right place now, Mr. Mackintosh wrote. Will you exhibit?
Are they good enough? I asked. My works were far from what the others at the school were producing. They weren’t the sorts of things one hung alongside the bold colors and allegories. All in pencil and soft lines, they faded.
They’re haunting, wrenching, honest, he replied. I’m reminded of Käthe Kollwitz. Those poor unfortunates in the pictures, they are the ones from whom society looks away. You look straight at them and their souls.
I was unused to praise. Who wants haunting, wrenching, and honest in the middle of a war?
Those who know it.
But I didn’t. I didn’t know any of it beyond what I saw in the corridors of the hospital. Those soldiers brought a memory of the trenches home with them, to carry around always.
Clare, I know a gallery, in Paris. The owner is an old friend. May I send one to him?
I thought and, with a hesitant pen, wrote, Yes.
The first one we sent, it sold right away. “A soldier, recently returned from the Front,” said Monsieur Santi, the gallery owner. The next two sold just as quickly. “You have an admirer,” he said, and asked me to send more.
Checks came to me in Glasgow, checks I held in disbelieving fists, then tucked away in the bottom of my washstand drawer. Share them with the world, Finlay had said. I hadn’t expected compensation for that.
I wrote to my grandfather at Fairbridge. I’ve done it. Like Grandmother, I’m an artist now.
When a letter came for me, it wasn’t from Perthshire. This envelope came from Paris. The stationery bore the insignia of the American Red Cross.
Studio for Portrait Masks
70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
Paris
January 1918
Dear Miss Ross,
My name is Anna Coleman Ladd and, under the auspices of the American Red Cross, I am attempting to set up a studio in Paris modeled after Lieutenant Francis Derwent Wood’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. I am not sure if you’ve read about Lt. Wood’s work with mutilated English soldiers, though you may have heard of his department, popularly called the “Tin Noses Shop.” Like yourself, Lt. Wood is an artist, and he has lectured at the Glasgow School of Art, so you may be familiar with him. He has pioneered a new and quite astonishing technique of casting thin metal masks that are light, comfortable, and quite lifelike. Not medicine, but rather art.
These masks can cover the whole face, depending on the degree of injury, or can cover only part of the face. Glass eyes can be added with durable lashes made of thin strips of painted metal. For masks that cover one’s mouth, an opening can be left for a cigarette. These masks are seamless. It is quite an impressive feat, to make masks delicate and thinner than a lady’s visiting card, yet conveying so much humanity in those few ounces of metal.
