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. 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. 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 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.
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