This miniature watercolour by Willard Morse Mitchell, titled Moonlight on Beautiful Lake L’Achigan, captures a quiet, cool-toned lakeshore illuminated by a pale moon veiled behind drifting clouds. Mitchell layers soft washes of blue to build a sense of atmospheric distance: silhouettes of wooded islands sit dark and weighty in the middle ground, while the far hills rise in deep indigo along the horizon.

The moonlight spreads gently across the lake’s surface, creating streaks and bands of soft reflected light that shift between icy blue, lavender, and muted yellow. Smooth rounded rocks in the foreground, painted in earthy greens and browns, anchor the composition and add a tactile solidity against the shimmering water.

Mitchell’s characteristic economy of detail—flat planes of colour, simplified contours, and subtle tonal shifts—creates a serene, contemplative nocturne that evokes the stillness and quiet glow of a Laurentian lake under moonlit sky.