We’ve seen this painting before on the cover of what was probably a lunch menu from the Texas Chief. This one is clearly a dinner menu for the Super Chief, and includes both a wider variety and slightly higher-class items, including oysters, omelet with apricot preserves, veal steak, and smoked Cornish hen. If I am reading the date codes correctly, this is from 1957.
Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this menu.
I recently took Amtrak’s Southwest Chief and wondered where the Red Cliffs depicted in the painting are located. I never saw them. One clue comes from a Santa Fe poster also depicting red cliffs with the subtitle, “Continental Divide, New Mexico” (see below). There are indeed red cliffs at the continental divide, but they are well back from the railroad, suggesting that the artist used “selective compression” (a term used in model railroading) when he painted the scene.
