Self-taught sculptor, printmaker, painter and teacher, born Weymouth, Dorset. Studied at Douglas School of Art and Technology, 1951–4, then at Slade School of Fine Art, 1956–9, teachers including Ceri Richards, Lynton Lamb and Anthony Gross. During 1959–60 Sandle concentrated on lithography in Paris. He then returned to England to teach, initially at Leicester College of Art, 1961–3, during which he formed the Leicester Group, then at Coventry College of Art until 1968. After several years teaching in Canada, in 1973 Sandle became professor of sculpture in Pforzheim, then in 1980 at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, in Karlsruhe. Sandle participated in many influential group shows in Britain and abroad. He had his first one-man show at Drian Gallery in 1963. Later solo exhibitions included Galerie Suzanne Fischer, Baden-Baden in 1979; Kunstverein, Mannheim, 1983; and several with his dealer Fischer Fine Art. There was an important retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1988, which toured to Germany in 1989. Mortality and war were key themes in Sandle’s work which was often on a large scale and owed something to the monumental output of sculptors such as Sir Alfred Gilbert and Charles Sargeant Jagger. Sandle was an outsider, but was elected RA in 1989. Arts Council, Imperial War Museum and Tate Gallery hold examples. Among commissioned works were Memorial for the Victims of a Helicopter Disaster, Mannheim, 1985, St George and the Dragon, London, 1988 and the Malta Siege Memorial, built 1992. In 2001, Sandle’s huge Seafarer’s Memorial, for the International Maritime Organisation headquarters, was placed on the Albert Embankment. Sandle was appointed The Kenneth Armitage Foundation’s first sculptor-in-residence in 2005. Lived in Launceston, Cornwall.

^{Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)}