A decade after his death, an artistic genius who called Port Arthur home is boosting a local museum that pays tribute to his work.

A previously little-known work by Robert Rauschenberg — “Milton” to his friends at Port Arthur High School in the early 1940s — has been drawing in droves of patrons to the Museum of the Gulf Coast, 700 Procter St., in downtown Port Arthur. The painting will remain in the museum for 60 days.

“We are knocking it out of the park,” said museum director Tom Neal, speaking both of visitors to the Rauschenberg Gallery in recent days but also about museum visitors for the year.

“Barely There” is a 27-by-36-inch work created in the late 1950s or early 1960s that alludes to a cosmetics campaign of that time. The piece, done in the “combine” style that Rauschenberg often used, was likely traded by the artist, born and reared here, to his friend Ralph Rosenthal, a New York City deli owner. He might have traded the piece for deli meals, said Tony Webber, current owner of the piece.

“Barely There” remained in the possession of Rosenthal’s son and then his daughter-in-law before she sold it before moving to Florida. Webber, CEO of Southwest Museum Services of Houston, acquired it in the last year. He chose to show it publicly for the first time at the Museum of the Gulf Coast, where Webber helped set up the local museum years ago, because it includes a Rauschenberg Gallery and because the artist treasured his hometown.

The piece was placed in the Rauschenberg Gallery on Friday and helped draw unusually large crowds Saturday and early this week, Neal said. The gallery includes about two dozen representations or original pieces of Rauschenberg’s work.

Sales in the museum’s gift shop were also unusually robust, Neal said.

Rauschenberg donated several posters — some signed — to the museum for fund-raising purposes. He also selected and donated pieces to the gallery that bears his name.

Neal said attendance in the museum through May is up some 43 percent this year. May’s attendance itself was 2,222 — the second-largest month ever for the museum. The largest month’s attendance came in May 2010 when the museum presented an Anne Frank exhibit.

“We’re more than halfway toward our attendance goal through May,” Neal said. “We’re going to have a really good year.”