Prized Monet Paintings at the Center of Milwaukee Art Museum and MFA St. Petersburg’s World Series Wager

When the Milwaukee Brewers face the Tampa Bay Rays in game one of the 122nd World Series tonight, they will be playing for more than just the right to hoist the sterling silver Commissioner’s Trophy after four wins. A rival museum’s Monet is also on the line.

The teams’ local art museums—the Milwaukee Art Museum, four miles east of where the Brewers play at American Family Field, and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, just over a mile west of the Rays’ Tropicana Field—have entered into a friendly wager, wherein the winning city’s museums earns the right to borrow a Monet painting from the loser’s collection.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is putting up Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, ca. 1903, while the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, is offering Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London, 1904.

According to MAM’s website, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect is the one and only Monet in its collection, is a visitor favorite, and is currently on view at the museum. It was given to the museum by Mrs. Albert T. Friedmann upon her death in 1950, one of more than 40 objects she bequeathed to MAM. The painting is one of dozens Monet made painted during trips to London, showing a foggy view of a bridge across the River Thames in London, with smokestacks in the background.

Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s Monet is also one of the museum’s prized possessions. It’s currently on view in an upstairs gallery while its usual location, in the MFA’s collection gallery, is closed for installation. “For visiting Brewers fans, it might be their only chance to see it,” said MFA curator Stanton Thomas in a statement. Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London was painted just a year after MAM’s canvas, and also shows buildings along the Thames. Monet made over a dozen plein-air paintings of London’s Houses of Parliament while on extended visits to the city in the early years of the 20th century.

This isn’t the first time the Milwaukee Art Museum has been involved in an art/sports crossover wager. In 2011, when the Green Bay Packers faced the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV, MAM and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh entered into a similar loan arrangement based on the outcome of the game. After the Steelers lost (…to then Packers, current Steelers QB Aaron Rodgers) 31-25, CMA’s Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting Bathers With Crab traveled to Milwaukee for three months for MAM’s exhibition “Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper.” If the Steelers and the Packers ever meet again and the Steel Curtain prevails, maybe then the Carnegie will get its hand (temporarily) on MAM’s prized Gustave Caillebotte 1977 painting, Boating on the Yerres.