Grif Teller: Biography, PRR Calendar Art & Legacy

Last revised: September 5, 2026

Griffith Harold “Grif” Teller (December 9, 1899 – April 8, 1993) never drew a Pennsylvania Railroad paycheck. He worked for the Osborne Company, a Newark calendar house, and later as a freelancer. From the 1928 wall calendar through 1942, and again from 1947 through 1958, he painted the oil that went on the Pennsy’s big calendars—27 of the 33 scenes in the 1925–1958 series. Hundreds of thousands of copies went out each year to shippers, passengers, and anyone the railroad wanted to remember it. For a generation that is how the public saw the Pennsylvania Railroad: K4s at dawn, GG1s at the Army–Navy game, Horseshoe Curve in oil.

He got the job overnight. In 1927 another Osborne artist had not produced a sketch for a morning meeting with the railroad. Teller painted through the night. The result, When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn, became the 1928 calendar and kept the account. He signed early work Griffith H. Teller. His boss, Tom Graham, told him Grif would stick. It did.

Grif Teller painting Ready to Go Pennsylvania Railroad streamlined K4s 3768 and K4s 5344

Ready to Go. Grif Teller. Pennsylvania K4s #3768, in Raymond Loewy streamlining applied in 1936 for the Broadway Limited, with K4s #5344. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · Newark and Osborne · 1928: the overnight painting · The wall calendars · War years and the return · Four paintings on this page · How he worked · After the calendars · Why he matters · Related reading · Sources

At a glance

Item	Detail
Name	Griffith Harold Teller. Signed Grif Teller on the PRR work
Born / died	December 9, 1899, Newark, N.J. — April 8, 1993, Westfield, N.J. (age 93). Buried Immaculate Conception Cemetery
Family	Parents Albert D. and Mary H. Teller. Wife Mabel (Osborne coworker). Children Robert, John, and Ruth. Long resident of Little Falls, N.J.
Training	Aunt Evelyn Ryerson French (early lessons). Fawcett School of Industrial Arts / Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. Art Students League, New York. Landscape study with John F. Carlson in the 1930s
Employer	Osborne Company (calendar and advertising art), Newark then Clifton, N.J., from 1918 (shipping room, then design). Laid off after Osborne was sold in 1953. Freelance thereafter. Never a PRR employee
PRR wall calendars	Series 1925–1958, 33 oils. Teller painted 27: 1928–1942 and 1947–1958. Last full-size wall calendar 1958 (Conway Yard)
First PRR oil	When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn, 1928 calendar. Overnight substitute sketch, 1927, then the finished painting
War gap	1943–44 Dean Cornwell; 1945 Alexander Leydenfrost; 1946 Frank Reilly. Patriotic scenes. Teller returned for 1947 (Working Partners)
Standard book	Dan Cupper, Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller, photographs by Ken Murry (Great Eastern, 1992; Stackpole reprint 2003)

The railroad, the curve, the GG1, and the Broadway are their own leaves. This page is the painter.

Newark, a lemonade stand, and Osborne

Teller was born in Newark on December 9, 1899, near the Erie Railroad’s Greenwood Lake branch. He and a brother ran a lemonade stand by the tracks. That is the origin story he told: he learned what a locomotive looked like before he learned what a client wanted. An aunt, Evelyn Ryerson French, gave him lessons at twelve or thirteen. Some of the first pictures went on the backs of shingles. He left Barringer High School as a junior for the Fawcett School of Industrial Arts, later the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, and finished in 1918. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York.

That same year he took a temporary job in the shipping department of the Osborne Company, a color-calendar and advertising house. He showed paintings to the head of the designing department and stayed. Osborne printed the Pennsylvania’s first wall calendar in 1925. Teller was on the staff. He was not yet the railroad’s painter. Early non-PRR work he signed Griffith H. Teller. Tom Graham, who ran Osborne’s art department, told him to sign Grif.

1928: When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn

In mid-1927 the artist Osborne had assigned to the 1928 Pennsy calendar had not produced a preliminary the railroad would see the next morning. The account was at risk. Teller took the job on the condition that if the railroad liked the sketch he would paint the finish. He worked through the night. When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn shows the eastbound Broadway Limited coming out of the dark into morning on the overnight Chicago–New York run—Juniata Valley country in the usual telling. The railroad bought it. The 1928 calendar is the start of the Teller series. The original later went to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg. PennDOT used the image on a “Preserve Our Heritage” license plate beginning in 1998.

Grif Teller When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn 1928 Pennsylvania Railroad Broadway Limited calendar painting

When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn. Grif Teller. 1928 Pennsylvania Railroad wall calendar: the pre-streamlined Broadway Limited. His first PRR calendar oil. American-Rails.com collection.

The Pennsylvania came back the next year. From 1929 through 1942 every wall-calendar oil is Teller. Titles from those years include Giant Conquerors of Space and Time (1931), The World’s Greatest Highway (1935, Horseshoe Curve), The Main Line of American Commerce (1938), Leaders of the Fleet of Modernism (1939), and The Steel King (1941). He painted the railroad at the peak of its power, on the main line, in places a shipper would recognize: Rockville Bridge, the Curve, the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh industrial edges. He was not inventing a fantasy Pennsy. He was selling the one that existed.

What the calendars were

The wall calendar was advertising, not a gallery print. Osborne printed it; the railroad handed it out by the hundreds of thousands. Cupper’s figure for the series is 33 oils from 1925 through 1958. Teller did 27. The picture also migrated onto timetables, matchbooks, playing cards, and magazine pages. A desk or a kitchen in the Northeast in 1938 could have a Teller hanging for twelve months whether the household owned a share of PRR stock or not.

He was a commercial landscape painter who had learned to put a locomotive in the landscape so it still read as a locomotive. That is a harder trick than a builder’s broadside. The calendars are why collectors still hunt the paper and why the oils, when they surface, bring railroad-art money. They are also why a biography of Teller is railroad history, not only art history. The Pennsy of the calendar is the Pennsy a large public remembered after the merger and the collapse.

1943–46, then 1947–58

In the war the railroad wanted patriotic pictures. Other Osborne (and contract) artists filled those years: Dean Cornwell 1943 and 1944, Alexander Leydenfrost 1945, Frank Reilly 1946. Teller’s last prewar calendar was 1942, Partners in National Defense. He returned for 1947, Working Partners—an EMD passenger diesel and a Q2 duplex in the same frame, which is the postwar Pennsy in one glance.

Osborne was sold to a competitor in 1953. Teller was laid off. The railroad kept him as a freelancer for the remaining wall calendars through 1958 (Conway Yard, the big classification plant west of Pittsburgh). Full-size wall calendars stopped after that. Pocket calendars used two more Teller scenes: 1960 Partners in Progress and a 1961 Zoo Tower view. Those are not the 28-inch wall sheets.

The four paintings on this page

The article here features four Teller oils. They are not a complete catalog. They are the ones on the site, and they span the job from the first calendar to the diesel-and-trailer 1950s.

Ready to Go. K4s 3768 in the 1936 Raymond Loewy casing for the Broadway Limited, with K4s 5344. 3768 is the streamlined Pacific everyone knows from publicity stills; 5344 is the unstreamlined running mate in the same picture. The live caption dated the canvas to 1936, the year of the Loewy casing. The 1936 wall calendar title in the standard lists is Speed-Safety-Comfort (electrified passenger at Claymont, Delaware). Treat Ready to Go as a Teller painting of those two K4s, not as a second name for the 1936 calendar sheet unless a catalogue raisonne says otherwise.

When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn (1928 calendar). First Teller PRR oil. Pre-streamlined Broadway Limited. The overnight save of the Osborne account.

Main Lines—Freight and Passenger (1949 calendar) is not on this page, but the older areas of this site once did and described it as a GG1 passing under a steam freight. The 1949 calendar scene is an electric-powered passenger train at Whitford, Pennsylvania, milepost 28. The GG1-and-steam sandwich belongs to a different picture. Crossroads of Commerce (1950) is three trains at the west end of Rockville Bridge, including J1 2-10-4 6444. The 1953 calendar reused the Crossroads of Commerce title for a main-line scene near Steubenville, Ohio.

Grif Teller Mass Transportation 1955 Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 locomotives Municipal Stadium Army-Navy game

Mass Transportation. Grif Teller. 1955 Pennsylvania Railroad wall calendar. GG1s at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for the Army–Navy game, a consist the railroad actually ran. American-Rails.com collection.

Mass Transportation (1955). A lineup of GG1s at Municipal Stadium (later JFK Stadium) in Philadelphia for the Army–Navy game. That was a real Pennsy assignment: extra sections, electric motors, a stadium the railroad could reach. Teller painted a traffic move, not a fantasy terminal.

Grif Teller Dynamic Progress 1956 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar Aerotrain and TrucTrain trailers

Dynamic Progress. Grif Teller. 1956 Pennsylvania Railroad wall calendar. GM’s Aerotrain, which the PRR tested and did not buy, and a TrucTrain of highway trailers on flats. American-Rails.com collection.

Dynamic Progress (1956). The calendar is selling a future the railroad was testing: GM’s Aerotrain and piggyback, which the Pennsy branded TrucTrain. The Aerotrain was a flop as a fleet. The trailers were not. Teller put both in one oil the year before the last two wall calendars. That is the late Pennsy talking to shippers, not a steam romantic looking backward.

Other Teller wall years worth knowing, even without a scan on this page: The Horseshoe Curve (1952, three trains on the curve—distinct from the 1935 World’s Greatest Highway, also at the curve); Working Partners (1947); Conway Yard (1958, last wall sheet).

How he worked

Teller went to the property. He stood at the Curve, at Rockville, at the stadium, at Conway. Dan Cupper’s line is that he was painter and historian: the pictures had to be accurate enough that a Pennsy official would hang them in an office. He studied with landscape painter John F. Carlson in the 1930s, which is a better influence to name than a vague Hudson River School. The locomotives are specific numbers when the oil is read closely. The geography is a real milepost. He was almost run down on the main once, studying a scene, when a GG1 came on and the engineer leaned on the whistle.

He married Mabel, who also worked at Osborne. They had three children. Little Falls, New Jersey, was home for much of his adult life. After the 1953 layoff he took other commercial work and freelance commissions and retired from that grind in 1968. Railroad fans had already found him.

Murry, Cupper, and Strasburg

Ken Murry, a Mountville, Pennsylvania, photographer, bought the 1953 Crossroads of Commerce original at a Philadelphia auction in 1976 and had Teller restore it. They became friends. Murry commissioned new oils, including Pride of the Pennsy, used on a 1980 tribute wall calendar for Teller’s eightieth birthday—same format as the 1940s–50s sheets, sold in a tube. Teller kept taking railroad commissions into the 1980s. More than fifty railroad paintings after the official calendars is the figure in Cupper’s circle.

Cupper’s Crossroads of Commerce, with Murry’s photographs of the art, is the book. Great Eastern Publishing, 1992; Stackpole reprint, 2003. The live page had the second author as “Ken Mury” and dated the book only 2003. Murry is the spelling on the title page. The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania holds Teller originals, including the 1928 dawn painting. That museum is the place to see the work in person. Confirm what is on view before you go.

Why he matters to rail history

O. Winston Link documented the last Class I steam railroad at night, on film, for himself. Teller documented the largest American railroad at high tide, in oil, for a client that printed the picture a third of a million times. Different jobs. Same result: a visual memory that outlived the company.

He was the Pennsy’s public painter for thirty years of wall calendars, with a four-year war gap. No other American railroad had a single artist that visible, that long, on that scale.
He was not a railfan with a brush. He was a calendar-house commercial artist who learned the railroad well enough that the railroad kept him after his employer was sold.
The pictures track the company. 1928 Broadway at dawn. 1936 streamlining. 1947 diesel and duplex. 1955 Army–Navy GG1s. 1956 Aerotrain and trailers. 1958 Conway Yard. That is a corporate history in oils.
The paper survived the railroad. Penn Central did not. The calendars did. Collectors, the Strasburg museum, and Cupper’s book are why a 1950s kitchen print still defines “Pennsylvania Railroad” for people who never rode it.

Teller died April 8, 1993, at his son’s house in Westfield, New Jersey. He was 93.

Pennsylvania Railroad
PRR passenger trains (Broadway Limited and the fleet)
PRR GG1
Horseshoe Curve
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Penn Central
O. Winston Link (another artist who fixed how the public sees a railroad)
Railroad history
Railroad museums

Sources

Dan Cupper, Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller, photographs by Ken Murry (Great Eastern Publishing, 1992; Stackpole Books, 2003): 33 calendars 1925–1958, Teller 27 of them; life and career
Dan Cupper, “Grif Teller Paints the Pennsy,” Pennsylvania Heritage: 1928–42 and 1947–58; Cornwell, Leydenfrost, Reilly in the war years; Carlson; Ken Murry from 1976; Pride of the Pennsy / 1980 tribute calendar
Wikipedia, “Grif Teller”: December 9, 1899–April 8, 1993; Osborne; 1928 first calendar; war gap; 1953 layoff; freelance through the end of the wall series
Philadelphia Inquirer, Rose Simmons, April 10, 1993, obituary: death at son’s home, Westfield; 1927 overnight sketch; Army–Navy, Rockville, Horseshoe, Edge Moor
Baltimore Sun, April 18, 1993, review of Cupper: Greenwood Lake lemonade stand; 1928 When the Broad Way Meets the Dawn; Murry as photographer of the book (Sun’s 1925 start date is the series, not Teller’s first oil)
Railroad Picture Archives / Thomas C. Ayers calendar-art album: year-by-year titles and locations (1949 Whitford; 1950 Rockville / J1 6444; 1952 Horseshoe Curve; 1953 Steubenville; 1955 Mass Transportation; 1956 Dynamic Progress; 1958 Conway Yard)
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission / Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania: 1928 painting; Teller holdings; PennDOT heritage plate
Higbytoys PRR calendar-art list: 1935 Horseshoe as World’s Greatest Highway; 1936 Speed-Safety-Comfort at Claymont; 1949 Whitford