The story
New Orleans got its art museum in 1911, when a Jamaican-born sugar broker named Isaac Delgado paid for a cool white Beaux-Arts building at the edge of City Park and gave it to the city, though it opened nearly bare and had to grow its collection almost from nothing.
Grow it did. The museum is now strong in French art, a nod to the city's history, along with a noted collection of Fabergé, glass and Southern decorative arts. Outside, the Besthoff Sculpture Garden threads modern sculpture through the live oaks and lagoons of the park, one of the few places you look at art among Spanish moss.
The city has a small claim on the Impressionists too. Edgar Degas spent several months here in 1872 with his mother's relatives, and it was on that visit that he painted the cotton office now kept in Pau, in the town where his family once traded.
