Kansas City, better at keeping promises than football, makes good on its Super Bowl wager of artwork

The Philadelphia Eagles’ victory in Super Bowl LIX has brought another trophy to the city.

Last week, Swoop and four Eagles cheerleaders shook their pom-poms enthusiastically as Edouard Manet’s The Croquet Party (1871) arrived at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Since Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, major art museums in the cities of the competing matchup teams have wagered significant work from their collections, loaning the championship-winning cities a piece of artwork for a few months. This amicable rivalry has been dubbed the Museum Bowl.

As a result of the Chiefs’ loss, the Nelson-Atkins is now loaning its treasured Manet for the exact number of days that Kansas City had Thomas Eakins’ Sailing from the Art Museum’s collection two years ago.

“The good news is you guys had to bring something here this time,” Sasha Suda, director and CEO of the PMA, said, speaking to the delegation from Kansas City.

The Croquet Party is an oil on canvas that shows a group of Manet’s friends enjoying a game of croquet at the fashionable resort of Boulogne-sur-Mer on France’s Normandy Coast.

Despite the loose brushwork, Manet includes enough detail to highlight the fashionably dressed women — Suzanne Manet (the artist’s wife and frequent model) and Jeanne Gonzalès (a pupil of Manet) ― and the dapper gentlemen, Paul Rodier, a childhood friend, and Léon Leenhoff, who was Manet’s stepson (often believed to be his biological son).

A sea breeze tugs at the women’s skirts as they stand on the croquet lawn outside the casino.

Croquet gained popularity in the late 19th century and enabled leisured men and women to meet outdoors and compete. Not unlike today’s pickleball, it provided a means for people to commune and socialize.

Its spontaneity and freshness may suggest a work done en plein air (outdoors), but Manet finished the piece in his studio, relying heavily on his sketches. The painting is a modern-yet-private scene of the artist’s inner circle enjoying a respite from the Franco-Prussian War that resulted in the siege of Paris.

Eight years before Manet painted The Croquet Party, he had exhibited Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, which created a critical storm. Then, in 1865, his Olympia generated added notoriety, and both paintings were considered to exemplify “vulgar modernity.” Though Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists, The Croquet Party suggests an obvious familiarity with the younger artists who made the most of rapid gestures and capturing the immediacy of a moment in time.

The Croquet Party was initially purchased by Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist painter who had inherited a fortune from his parents and used his money to buy works from his artist friends. Caillebotte bought the canvas directly from Manet in 1879, and it remained in the family until 1973.

It was eventually purchased by Marion and Henry Bloch, cofounders of H&R Block and Kansas City philanthropists, who gifted the painting to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in 2015.

“It is a nice way of celebrating the two museums,” added Jenny Thompson, curator of European painting and sculpture at the PMA.

Despite the Chiefs’ loss, Julian Zugazagoitia, director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins put a positive spin on the wager, saying: “Our painting [which has become a poster image for the Nelson-Atkins] is now spending time in proximity with its siblings.”

The Croquet Party complements Manet’s The Folkestone Boat, Boulogne (1868), which would have traveled from Pennsylvania to Missouri if the Birds hadn’t had a spectacular win. The two Manets are now hanging together for the first time since 1873.

Suzanne Manet appears in both of the pieces that were inspired by Manet’s repeated visits to the seaside resort in northern France, which he first visited in 1864. In the summer of 1871, he returned to Boulogne to recuperate from “nervous exhaustion following the siege of Paris by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War,” as the Nelson-Atkins website notes.

These canvases are paired with two additional Manets with marine subjects from PMA’s collection: The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama (1864) and The Steamboat, Seascape with Porpoises (1868).

Both the PMA and the Nelson-Atkins Museum have highly regarded and extraordinary holdings of French artworks. “We enhance each other more than a rivalry,” said Zugazagoitia, adding that his museum’s painting “is in conversation with the incredible collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.”

In 2018, the PMA received a pre-Revolutionary War portrait by John Singleton Copley from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as a result of the Eagles’ Super Bowl win against the New England Patriots. In 2023, the PMA, unfortunately, had to loan Thomas Eakins’ Sailing to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

But for now, until Aug. 17, the Manet masterwork with its elaborately carved gilded frame is prominently displayed on a kelly green panel above the Eagles logo in Gallery 252.

There are no birds in the four Manet paintings, but Swoop, cavorting around the gallery and sometimes coming too close to the works on display, didn’t seem to mind. He and both of the art institutions are already looking forward to next year’s Museum Bowl wager.