Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast was caught in the crosshairs of two punting museum directors.

Didn’t think the art world got serious about a football match? Guess again.

In 2015, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks headed to the Super Bowl. The ballsy punters over at the Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Institute of Art decided to make a bet: Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast vs. Winslow Homer’s West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900). 

The betted items were landscape paintings depicting their respective coastlines, which would hang in the winning museum for three months, with the loser taking on all expenses. The two directors responsible for the bet are Kimerly Rorschach of the Seattle Museum and Michael Conforti of the Clark Art Institute. 

Albert Bierstadt was a painter of the American West. His landscapes were a relief during the age of American Industrialization. Having received art training in Germany, Bierstadt’s vision of an American landscape was influenced by the European style. Bierstadt took an unorthodox approach to painting landscapes. While Bierstadt did visit the Pacific West, he usually opted to sketch and take notes of the scene rather than set up and easel and pull out the paint tubes. 

Bierstadt painted the sound years after his visit to the West – in his New York studio. That’s right, he was in New York when he painted the scene of crashing waves and Native Americans pulling boats to the shore. Depicting Native Americans in his paintings was not unusual for the artist to do. The people portrayed in Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast were the Chinook people. Bierstadt revealed a usual day in their lives, where they pulled in their livelihood from small boats: baskets of salmon. 

This work Bierstadt seven years to paint. And it doesn’t always accurately depict the landscape. For some reason or another, parts of the Columbia River can be seen in Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. Long after Bierstadt’s death, the inaccuracies of the painting caused it to be retitled The Storm.

Anyways, it didn’t matter if Bierstadt didn’t get every exact detail of the landscape correctly. At the time, the painting was considered to be accurate and people loved it. Some of his paintings were purchased by the United States government. They also inspired lawmakers to create National Parks. He is one of America’s first artist celebrities. 

What about that bet, you ask? Luckily for Conforti, the New England Patriots won 28-24.