Milwaukee and St. Petersburg museums bet Monet paintings on the baseball finals

Two American museums have bet on Monet

The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, have struck up a jocular wager on the outcome of the finals of Major League Baseball, in which the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays are playing this year. The stakes are paintings by Claude Monet.

Under the terms of the wager, the museum of the losing city will lend its Monet to the museum of the winning city for a time, while title to the painting will, of course, remain with its present owner. The Milwaukee Art Museum is staking Waterloo Bridge, Sun Effect, painted around 1903 and bequeathed to the museum in 1950. The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg is staking Houses of Parliament, Fog Effect, London of 1904.

The Milwaukee Art Museum has been party to such a wager before. In 2011, ahead of Super Bowl XLV, the final of the National Football League between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, the museum wagered with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The Carnegie put up Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bathers with a Crab, while the Milwaukee Art Museum put up Gustave Caillebotte's Boats on the Yerres.

The 2026 finals are under way as we speak, a best-of-seven series, the first to four wins. The first game took place on Friday, 23 October, and ended in a 3:2 victory for the Milwaukee Brewers. The second game is being played today, Saturday, 24 October, at the Brewers' home ground. The teams will then travel to Florida, where games will be played on 26, 27 and 28 October at the home field of the Tampa Bay Rays. If no winner has emerged by then, the sixth and seventh games will return to Milwaukee on 30 and 31 October