Willard M. Mitchell

Who was Willard M. Mitchell?

Willard Morse Mitchell was a Canadian artist and architect best known for his miniature watercolour paintings. They were mostly nature scenes.

He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, the youngest of six children. He attended Rothesay Collegiate and later studied art and architecture in Saint John. He was married in 1904 and that year he moved to Amherst, Nova Scotia. For nearly two decades, he worked as an architect and made paintings in Amherst. He moved to Belleville, Ontario in 1923 and in 1927 he removed to Montreal where he focused exclusively on the sale of his art as souvenir pieces. He died in Montreal in 1955.

He is noted for painting very small pieces of art, often no more than 150 square centimetres in size. Many of his latter works depict scenes from rural Quebec. He made his own hand-carved frames and printed paper backings for his pieces that told the story behind the scene depicted; thus he made several versions of the same picture. Mitchell would copy his most popular scenes using carbon paper on top of watercolour paper, making each scene appear as an original.