A Philadelphia-Kansas City wager. This one of oils and canvas.

Philadelphia’s and Kansas City’s major art museums have drawn up terms for a Super Bowl bet.

The prize of this wager: one 19th century French oil painting.

If the Eagles win the NFL championship on Sunday, Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has agreed to send The Croquet Party by Édouard Manet to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

If the Chiefs prevail, Philadelphia’s museum will ship off one of its Manets, The Folkestone Boat, Boulogne, to the Nelson-Atkins.

Whichever painting travels, it won’t be changing hands for good — just on loan. The idea is that whichever city wins will display the two works side by side for a few months.

“It’s a nice way of engaging in a conversation around the Super Bowl,” said Jennifer Thompson, head of the Philadelphia museum’s department of European paintings and sculpture, “but also bringing visitors in to really focus on the collection.”

Thompson and other curators considered which paintings to wager not based on any connection to sports. “You might call croquet a sport, although it doesn’t have quite the same sense of competition [as football], perhaps,” said Thompson.

Rather, the two Manets were chosen because they share certain qualities. The artist’s family appears in both works: his wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and her son, Leon, are the two central figures in grey and black in the croquet scene, and they appear as the figures in brown and white on the left end of the landing in Philadelphia’s canvas.

They are also both small works, each a little more than two feet long.

“Unlike the Eagles’ offensive line, these are modest pictures. But they pack a punch,” says Thompson. “And I think that speaks to an artist on holiday, who’s not thinking about a big canvas that’s going to be shown at the salon. He’s thinking about something a little more spontaneous.”

When the two museums placed a similar bet for the Super Bowl in 2023, the Philadelphia Museum of Art settled up with Thomas Eakins’ Sailing — and then as a bonus, threw in an Eakins sketch for his painting Monsignor James P. Turner (which belongs to the Nelson-Atkins).

Thompson said there were other potential details being discussed about the wager with the Nelson-Atkins, but she didn’t want to reveal too much, “because everybody is so superstitious about what might happen on Sunday.”

She was willing to venture, however, that she hopes “we’re going to be playing a lot of croquet in Philadelphia this spring and summer.”