Today’s menu features a painting of Yellowstone Falls glued on the front cover. While it is a pretty painting, the colors don’t look anything like the actual colors of the rocks around Yellowstone Falls, which makes me think the artist was working from a black-and-white photo.

Click image to download a 542-KB PDF of this menu.

That artist was R. (for Robert) Atkinson Fox (1860-1935). Fox specialized in landscape paintings but also did dreamlike paintings reminiscent of Maxfield Parrish. Parrish was ten years younger than Fox but probably preceded him in this style.

The painting also says “B&B St. Paul,” which refers to Brown & Bigalow, a publisher of calendars and other promotional materials that railroads and other companies could hand out. B&B contracted with Fox to do scores if not hundreds of paintings for calendars and, in this case, menus for its many clients.

Fox was born in Toronto and studied art there and in Europe before moving to New York in the late 1880s. Although he later moved to Chicago to be closer to clients like Brown & Bigalow, his biography says “he had never been to the West at the time when he painted his Western landscapes,” which I guessed from looking at this painting. Some of his paintings may verge on fine art, but mostly he was a commercial artist and known to do complete paintings in as little as one day.

The menu was used on the same trip of the 33rd division as yesterday’s. In fact, the menu itself is identical to yesterday’s, so the two menu covers must have been used for the same meal.