The story
In 1878 the small museum of Pau, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, did something no institution had done before: it bought a painting by Edgar Degas. He was in his forties and still far from famous, and the picture cost the town 2,000 francs.
That painting, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, still hangs here as the museum's great prize. Degas painted it in 1873 on a visit to his mother's family in Louisiana, showing his uncle's cotton firm mid-business, men in black coats handling raw cotton and reading newspapers in a plain, bright office. It was the first of his works to enter any public collection.
Around it the museum holds a broad spread of European painting, from Spanish and Flemish old masters to Rubens and later French art, but people cross the region for the Degas, bought when almost no one else would take a chance on him.
