By the '40s, four eggs were in the hands of Maurice Sandoz, heir to the Sandoz pharmaceuticals fortune, whose collection of antique automata--clockwork animals and humans--was to become one of the finest ever assembled.
Barnes (1872-1951), the physician who devoted a fortune made from a drug of his own invention, Argyrol, to the creation of this extraordinary collection, every item expressed his obsessively personal vision and idiosyncratic ideas about art.