Art Museums in Milwaukee and Tampa Bay Are Betting That Their Hometown Baseball Teams Will Win the World Series. The Wager? Monet Paintings

As the Brewers take on the Rays in the Fall Classic, two art museums are engaged in a friendly bit of sports betting: The winning city (temporarily) gets a Monet from the other city’s collection

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 26, 2026 2:16 p.m.

As the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays face off in the 2026 World Series, there’s more than baseball on the line. In addition to the Commissioner’s Trophy, the two teams are playing for works of fine art.

The Milwaukee Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, have agreed to a friendly wager: The museum from the losing team’s city will send a Claude Monet painting from its collection to the winner’s museum, where it will have a “victory lap in the galleries,” per a statement from the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

“When I moved to Milwaukee, I became a part of the Brew Crew,” Kim Sajet, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, says in the statement. “They’re the best team in baseball, and I’m backing them with one of our most beloved paintings. Two Monets will look incredible in our galleries … Go Brewers!”

Klaudio Rodriguez, executive director and CEO of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, responds: “We admire Kim’s enthusiasm, but we think Milwaukee’s Monet would enjoy a little Florida vacation. We’re backing the Rays all the way, and we’re ready to welcome Milwaukee’s masterpiece to St. Petersburg. Let’s see Milwaukee put its Monet where its mouth is.”

The Brewers currently enjoy a 2-0 series lead ahead of Game 3 in Tampa Bay on Monday night. If they win two more games and emerge victorious, the “Brew Crew” will welcome St. Petersburg’s Houses of Parliament: Effect of Fog, London to its galleries.

Created in 1904, the painting depicts the Palace of Westminster with two silhouetted boats in the River Thames on a grey London day. It is among the more than one hundred canvases and 20 pastels that Monet produced of the Thames around the turn of the 20th century. The London series is the artist’s second-largest, behind only his Water Lilies collection, which comprises nearly 300 canvases.

While Monet was creating his Thames paintings, he insisted on keeping the group of works cohesive. “I cannot send you a single canvas of London,” Monet wrote to his art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1903. “It is indispensable to have them all before me, and to tell the truth not one is definitely finished. I develop them all together.”

The final paintings are today spread apart in collections across the world, but no matter which team wins their first World Series title, two of Monet’s Thames paintings will be reunited, at least temporarily.

If the Rays stage a comeback, the art museum in St. Petersburg—the city on the Tampa Bay where the Rays play—will exhibit the Milwaukee Art Museum’s only Monet: Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, dated to 1903.

Depicting the Thames glistening with sunlight and dark plumes of smoke emitting from factories in the background, the piece is one of Monet’s many depictions of the Waterloo bridge, which he painted at different times of day, from foggy sunrise to clearer sunset.

To work on his London series—composed of views of the House of Parliament, Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge—Monet traveled from Paris to London via train and boat. His first trip across the English Channel came in 1870, to avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War.

Monet made multiple trips to London in the late 1890s and the early 1900s. He painted the two bridges from his room’s balcony at the Savoy Hotel and painted the Houses of Parliament from St. Thomas’ Hospital in the afternoons. Painting the same scenes over and over offered the painter ample opportunity to experiment with weather and light, to see the subtlest of shifts.

“I adore London; it’s a mass, a whole, and it’s so simple. But what I love more than anything in London is the fog,” Monet told art dealer René Gimpel in 1920.

Both Houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge are currently on view at their respective institutions. The details of the winning loan will be announced after the World Series concludes.

Art museums have taken up friendly sports betting in recent years. In 2023, the Philadelphia Museum of Art sent a painting by Thomas Eakins to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, after the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. After the Eagles won the 2025 rematch, Kansas City sent an Édouard Manet painting to Philadelphia.

This isn’t the first time that the Milwaukee Art Museum has engaged in a championship bet. In 2011, when the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl, the institution received Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bathers With Crab, painted circa 1890-1899, from the Carnegie Museum of Art, and exhibited the work for three months.

“The game was certainly a nail-biter!” the Pittsburgh museum posted to social media after the Steelers' defeat. “And true to our word, the beautiful Renoir will have a short vacation in the Milwaukee Art Museum galleries. Wonder who we’ll be wagering with next year?”