Markle was born in
Hamilton, Ontario, in 1936. In 1954, he began attending the
Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he met his wife, Marlene Shuster. Since his wife worked at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, his work came to the attention of
Avrom Isaacs, and he held his first solo exhibition at the Gallery in 1963. He is considered one of the "Isaacs Group" of artists. In 1968, a
retrospective of his work was held at the McIntosh Memorial Art Gallery at the
University of Western Ontario. In 1989, the
Thunder Bay Art Gallery curated ''The Painter and his Model: Markle since '85
. The Durham Art Gallery organized Markle retrospectives in 1990 and 2002. In 2003, Anna Hudson for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, organized an exhibition entitled Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland'', in which Markle's work was sharply criticized, and Markle called a misogynist by the Toronto
Globe and Mail. In 2011,
Blazing Figures: A Retrospective of Robert Markle opened at the Gallery de Boer in Owen Sound. Markle's work has been collected by public institutions such as the
National Gallery of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Robert Markle fonds (SC076) in the
Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, documents his life and work. There is also a J.A. Wainwright – Robert Markle collection in this repository. Markle taught at The New School of Art (founded in 1965) from around 1966 to 1976. In 1977, he was a founding member of Art's Sake Inc., an artist-run post-secondary art school in Toronto, where he also taught. In addition, Markle taught at the
University of Guelph. ==Commissions==