School in a Garden, c.1934

After showing the watercolour Amateur Hockey, n.d., in an Ontario Society of Artists exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1934, MacLeod continued to explore her interest in painting children. In School in a Garden, she depicts a group of students tending a garden plot across from her parents’ Ottawa home, as seen from her attic studio. Compared with her earlier landscapes, School in a Garden signals a decisive turn towards figural compositions teeming with movement. It also foreshadows the bustling, improvisational city scenes that would later define her style.

In creating this large-scale oil painting rendered in vivid shades of green, MacLeod had a unique angled vantage point on the scene. The elevated perspective allowed her to stage the composition dynamically across multiple planes. In the foreground, a chain-link fence frames the figures gathering flowers and leaning against a bicycle. Their stillness is heightened by the lively movement on the other side of the fence, where children bend over to weed and work in the garden. The juxtaposition between calm observation in the foreground and lively activity in the background creates a dramatic visual rhythm.

MacLeod later reflected on the central importance of the school garden in shaping her early artistic development, remarking, “That garden and the children working in it inspired most of my early work.” According to art historian Joan Murray, MacLeod’s paintings of schoolchildren in gardens were a breakthrough in her practice, signalling a shift towards scenes of multiple figures absorbed in activity. Paintings like School in a Garden also introduced the sinuous brush strokes that would become part of her signature style. MacLeod returned to this subject matter throughout the 1930s, working in oil and in her few surviving sketchbooks, where she used watercolour almost exclusively.