WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- The New England Patriots weren’t the only big winners on Super Bowl Sunday. Malcolm Butler’s last-minute interception of Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback Russell Wilson’s pass also resulted in a victory for…the Clark Art Institute. While the Patriots’ dramatic victory brought Super Bowl rings to the team, it also brings a very special loan to the Clark. As a result of a friendly rivalry between the Clark and the Seattle Art Museum, Albert Bierstadt’s epic painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast will soon come to the Berkshires for a special presentation. The painting will be unveiled in the Clark’s galleries at 1 pm on Friday, April 17 and will remain on view through July 19. To celebrate its arrival and to commemorate Patriots Day, the Clark will offer free admission to all visitors sporting New England Patriots or Seattle Seahawks gear on Monday, April 20.

#MuseumBowl
In the days prior to the 2015 Super Bowl game between the Patriots and the Seahawks, the Seattle Art Museum approached the Clark to ask if the two museums might undertake a similar match-up. Each museum put the loan of one of its prized works on the line. The stakes: a three-month loan of a painting would go to the winning museum. The arts-world throwdown, quickly dubbed #MuseumBowl, created an exceptional opportunity for football fans and art lovers to share in the fun of Super Bowl Sunday. The lineup pitted Seattle’s magnificent Bierstadt against the Clark’s beloved Winslow Homer, West Point, Prout’s Neck, creating a coastline-to-coastline competition between the grandeur of New England’s rocky Atlantic coast and an equally majestic view of the Pacific coastal region. The losing museum would be responsible for crating and shipping their masterpiece to the winning institution.

Leading up to gameday, the Clark and SAM engaged in a lively social media showdown, including an epic Twitter battle that trended in major cities across the country. By the day of the big game, art and football lovers united in cheering for their home teams. With Butler’s goal-line heroics securing a New England victory, the Clark’s curatorial team began the happy task of planning for the installation of the massive (nearly five feet by seven feet) painting.

“I have to admit that in the last few minutes of the game, we began thinking about what it would take to crate and ship our Prout’s Neck to Seattle,” said Richard Rand, the Clark’s Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Senior Curator. “I’m sure Malcolm Butler didn’t realize it at the moment, but his heroics were a tremendous gift to New England art lovers as well as to football fans.”

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, 1870 by Albert Bierstadt
In 1870, Albert Bierstadt painted one of the most novel subjects of his career: Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. This spectacular, eight-foot-wide view of Puget Sound resulted from newly reawakened interest in a region the artist had visited only briefly seven years before. This painting is more than just a landscape painting. It is also a historical work, a narrative of an ancient maritime people, and a rumination on the ages-old mountains, basaltic rocks, dense woods, glacial rivers, and surf-pounded shores that have given the Northwest its look and also shaped its culture.