A Monet Rides on the World Series: Milwaukee and St. Petersburg Museums Bet Paintings

A Claude Monet painting will change cities if the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays in the 122nd World Series, which opens tonight. The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, have wagered a Monet apiece: the winning city's museum borrows a Monet from the loser's collection.

The stakes are named and specific. Milwaukee is putting up Monet's Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, ca. 1903. St. Petersburg is offering Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London, 1904.

The museums sit close to the ballparks. The Milwaukee Art Museum stands four miles east of American Family Field, where the Brewers play. The MFA, St. Petersburg, lies just over a mile west of the Rays' Tropicana Field.

What does each painting mean to its museum?

Milwaukee's canvas carries unusual weight. According to MAM's website, Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect is the only Monet in the museum's collection and a visitor favorite. It is currently on view. Mrs. Albert T. Friedmann gave it to the museum upon her death in 1950, among more than 40 objects she bequeathed to MAM. The painting shows a foggy view of a bridge across the River Thames in London, with smokestacks in the background, one of dozens Monet painted during trips to London.

St. Petersburg's Monet is also a prized possession. Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London is on view in an upstairs gallery while its usual location, in the MFA's collection gallery, is closed for installation. MFA curator Stanton Thomas addressed traveling fans directly in a statement: "For visiting Brewers fans, it might be their only chance to see it."

The two canvases are near twins in date and subject. Monet painted the St. Petersburg work just a year after Milwaukee's, and it also shows buildings along the Thames. Monet made over a dozen plein-air paintings of London's Houses of Parliament during extended visits to the city in the early years of the 20th century.

Has this happened before?

This is not the Milwaukee Art Museum's first art-sports crossover. In 2011, when the Green Bay Packers faced the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV, MAM and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh struck a similar loan arrangement tied to the game's outcome. The Packers won, 31-25 — with then-Packers, current Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers — and the Carnegie's Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bathers With Crab, traveled to Milwaukee for three months for MAM's exhibition "Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper."

There remains an open account between those two museums. If the Steelers and the Packers ever meet again and the Steel Curtain prevails, the Carnegie could get its hand, temporarily, on MAM's prized Gustave Caillebotte painting, Boating on the Yerres.

Tonight, the pattern returns to baseball. Four Brewers wins would send a London fog scene from Florida to Wisconsin; a Rays title would send Milwaukee's only Monet south.