For Santa Fe’s 1981 calendar it used a painting by Frederic Mizen, an artist that Santa Fe relied on heavily for its commercial art in the 1950s and 1960s. We’ve seen his work at least a half a dozen times before, including this image of Santa Fe passenger trains in the Albuquerque depot, a painting of Taos in which a little pueblo girl breaks the fourth wall, and a painting of New York’s Fifth Avenue for the railroads’ “Travel by Train” campaign of the 1930s.
Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this calendar.
This painting depicting Navajo sand painters appears to be less commercial than the ones mentioned above. Of course, it still advertises the beauty that Americans could find by taking Santa Fe trains to New Mexico and Arizona. Santa Fe also used Mizen paintings on its 1968 and 1980 calendars.