When Johnnie Comes Marching Home, c.1946

MacLeod often framed her compositions through the vantage point of her apartment, looking across at the other tenement buildings and down at the street to capture the vitality of city life, a motif she began exploring in Ottawa during the 1930s. This painting depicts a densely layered New York street scene full of figures in motion. The canvas is so busy that the viewer’s eye struggles to find a focal point. As MacLeod stated, “There are always figures in the windows. The window is New York’s resting place.” This work continues MacLeod’s interest in the home front and military parades—subjects she took up explicitly in Morning Parade, 1944.

Art historian Laura Brandon has observed that even in MacLeod’s non-war subjects, “no part of each canvas is free of her swirls and staccato marks.” This restless surface energy is balanced by the underlying architectural structure of the city, which anchors each composition. MacLeod acknowledged the difficulty her New York work posed for contemporary viewers. She told fellow artist Marian Dale Scott (1906–1993), in reference to a work in a 1944 Canadian Group of Painters exhibition, “The press couldn’t understand my picture.” Yet she remained resolute in her artistic direction, declaring that her “88th Street [project] has been a very important experience for me.”

When Johnnie Comes Marching Home was included in MacLeod’s touring exhibition Manhattan Cycle, which was composed of 110 paintings of New York, mainly of people in the city’s streets. The exhibition was still on tour when she died prematurely at the age of forty-five.