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Artwork Sailing East After Patriots’ Super Bowl Win

A bit of the Puget Sound will be heading east after last night’s heart-stopping Super Bowl ending. The New England Patriots upended the defending champion Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX (49) by a score of 28-24. That means the Clark Art Institute won the #MuseumBowl.

The Williamstown, Mass., museum made a friendly wager on the game with the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). The 1870 oil on canvas “Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast,” by Albert Bierstadt will be loaned by SAM to the Clark Institute later this year. Had the Seahawks triumphed, the Clark Institute would have loaned Winslow Homer’s 1900 oil on canvas, “West Point, Prout’s Neck.”

Last year, SAM was victorious in its bet with Denver Art Museum (DAM), securing The Broncho Buster, a nearly 2-foot bronze sculpture cast by Frederic Remington in 1902 from DAM’s western American art collection, for three months. The two developed the Twitter hashtag #SAMvDAM while this year it was dubbed #MuseumBowl.

There were other charity-related friendly bets on this year’s big game:

  • Seattle public television station KCTS will be shipping salmon from the famous Pike Place Market to their counterparts at WGBH in Boston. Had the Seahawks held on, WGBH would have shipped lobsters from the Gulf of Maine west to KCTS.
  • Seahawks fan Chris Pratt, star of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie, will make an appearance in character as “Star Lord” at Christopher’s Haven, a Boston nonprofit that provides supportive housing for families whose children are receiving outpatient pediatric cancer treatments. The actor wagered with “Captain America” actor Chris Evans, who was rooting for the Patriots, with the loser having to appear at a local children’s hospital. After a week of talking up the wager on Twitter, the two said via Twitter that they would both make appearances together at the two hospitals.

The Seattle Foundation sponsored a “Charity Challenge,” asking people to like the foundation’s Facebook page and guess the final score of the game, and as a potential tiebreaker also predict how many carries Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch will have. The winner will get to choose a qualified King County nonprofit to receive a $4,900 donation from the foundation. If there are no winners, a random drawing will be held from among all eligible entries. An announcement was expected today.