A Bust and a Novel: Two Sculptors’ Homages to Henry James

Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926) and Anna Coleman Ladd (1878–1939) are remembered today as war artists who made masks for facially disfigured veterans. Both had had careers as sculptors before their special mission during the Great War began, and both picked up where they had left off in later years. Both, independently of each other, had a “Henry James episode” in their lives. This paper addresses the acts of commemoration in Wood’s bust of Henry James (1913) and in Ladd’s reworking of James’s international romances of the 1870s and early ’80s in her second novel, The Candid Adventurer (1913).