One of the many Southern Pacific posters that used paintings by California artist Maurice Logan centered around an image of Mission Santa Barbara. The SP used this image, which was painted around 1930, in several other places as well.
First is a piece of on-board stationery that included a color image of the mission. I only have the envelope but presumably there were letterheads that had the same image.
Click image to download a PDF of this envelope.
I do have a piece of letterhead that has a similar image but in a sepia tone. This not only has the addition of a palm tree, it shows the mission from a slightly different angle so may only have been patterned after, rather than directly based on, Logan’s painting.
Click image to download a PDF of this letterhead.
Finally, the menu below from the 1937 Pacific Limited has the same palm-tree-and-mission image on its cover. This particular menu is from the New York Public Library. Note that the words “Dinner Select” are actually on the inside of the menu, but that the front cover is slightly smaller than the back so the words appear when the menu is folded.
Click image to download a 0.8-MB PDF of this menu.
The menu has four main entrées–sea bass, New England boiled dinner, chicken fricasee, and broiled steak–that appear on both the a la carte and table d˙hote sides. The table d’hôte meals are 15 cents (about $2.50 today) more than the a la carte, except for the sea bass which was just a nickel more–a good deal considering the table d’hôte comes with soup, potato, bread, dessert, and beverage. For comparison, 50 cents in 1937 is about $8 today.