Édouard-Marcel Sandoz was born in Basel in 1881. He was the son of the Swiss industrialist Édouard Constant Sandoz. Until the age of 20 he divided his time between Lausanne and Château d'Oex. From 1900 to 1903, he attended the School of Decorative Arts in Geneva, then left for Paris in 1904. There he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where his teacher was the sculptor and painter Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié. At the beginning of his career, Sandoz's style was influenced by cubism, but he soon abandoned it in favour of a more naturalistic representation. A figurative and animal sculptor, his favourite materials are bronze, various stones such as marble, semi-precious stones and ceramics. He does not only focus on sculpture but is also a painter. He created various objects, including lamps, paper trays, bookends, paperweights and radiator caps for cars. In the 1920s, he developed a light projection process for theatre sets. Édouard-Marcel Sandoz was an innovative artist and one of the first sculptors to use coloured stones in his works, which caused controversy because they did not correspond to the "rules of art" of the time. In 1933, he founded the French society of animal artists. Sandoz collaborated on several occasions with the Swiss architect Jean Tschumi for, among other things, the Nestlé pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair and for the construction of the Sandoz laboratories in Orléans. He is particularly well known for his animal sculptures, for which he draws his inspiration from living animals. In 1947 Édouard-Marcel Sandoz was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in 1959 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in natural sciences by the University of Lausanne for his research into animals. He spent most of his life in Paris, but often returned to Switzerland. He died in Lausanne in 1971.