Pegi Nicol MacLeod was a Canadian painter widely admired by her contemporaries for her fierce determination and upbeat personality. She was born in Listowel, Ontario in 1904 and studied under Franklin Brownell at the Ottawa Art Association, then at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In the years following her schooling, she mainly painted landscapes in Ottawa and Quebec, while living at her family home in Ottawa, where she had a studio. In 1927 she traveled to Western Canada, where she painted landscapes and First Nations people. She lived in Toronto from 1934 to 1937, when she married Norman MacLeod and moved with him to New York City. Moving to New York allowed MacLeod to explore a different scene for her artistic inspiration – she painted urban streets and also produced numerous studies of her daughter. She returned to Canada every summer to teach art courses at the University of New Brunswick.

MacLeod’s main media were watercolour and oil. She was a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (1936) and the Canadian Group of Painters (1937). She exhibited with the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy and was in several annual exhibitions mounted by the National Gallery of Canada. During World War II, MacLeod was commissioned to paint the women’s division of the Canadian armed forces. She died in New York City in 1949 at the age of 45, after an extended illness. In 2005, a film about MacLeod entitled Something Dancing About Her was released, directed by Michael Ostroff.