Montreal Harbour from St. Helen’s Island, 1933

MacLeod’s brushwork is fluid and dynamic, with curving lines suggesting movement within the foliage and on the land. The large cloud formations and beams of light breaking through the sky create a dramatic atmosphere. Throughout the painting, bold warm tones in the background, cool greens in the foreground, and an intensely bright reflection of light on the river at the work’s centre produce a striking juxtaposition. Another version of this scene, Harbour Bridge, c.1933, depicts the same area from a different vantage point, looking east toward the newly completed Harbour Bridge (later renamed the Jacques Cartier Bridge).

Unlike the Precisionism-inspired harbour scenes of Montreal artist Adrien Hébert (1890–1967), which emphasize architectural order, MacLeod’s expressive brushwork evokes the tension between nature and encroaching modern industry. These are qualities that contemporaries like Graham McInnes recognized as unmistakably her own. McInnes once wrote, “She had a wonderful way of seeing the world without eyelids. She could take a group of children playing in a slum street, a tangle of narcissus bulbs in a flowerpot, a view of smoky steaming winter Montreal from St. Helen’s Island in mid-St. Lawrence, and put on them all the stamp of her own personality; a series of disjointed writhing images, never at ease, full of bubbling enthusiasm.”