Equestrian painter, writer, illustrator and teacher, born in Ashley Green, Buckinghamshire. Her knowledge of horses was based on riding from a small child. In her mid-teens she attended L’École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, then with Lynwood Palmer, who urged McLeod to study George Stubbs’s The Anatomy of the Horse and to keep up her riding. McLeod had a first solo show with Ackermann, 1947, another with Fores Ltd, 1953. In 1960 she produced her book of pictures, A Hundred Horses. Notable among her pupils was Michael Jeffery. Her husband, Adrian Thorpe, crippled and in a wheelchair, was an expert and writer on parrots, many of which lived in their west London house. McLeod, who looked after him for years from the mid-1950s, suffered from multiple sclerosis and eventually a fatal fall.