The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced the largest cash bequest in its history, a donation of more than $35 million from one of its steadiest benefactors in recent decades.



Massachusetts collector Dorothy Braude Edinburg, who died in Jan. 2015, donated the money in her will and, in an unusual move, earmarked it for new art purchases. The final figure is still being determined.



"Thirty-five million dollars-plus can go a very long way," said Douglas Druick, the museum's president and director. "It dramatically adds to our acquisition funds. This is of course terribly important because we're all about works of art and acquiring them."



The Edinburg cash bequest comes on the heels of the Art Institute last year receiving its largest art donation in history, the 40-plus contemporary and modern works valued at some $400 million and now on display as the Edlis/Neeson Collection. Chicago collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, a married couple, donated those works.



The Edinburg gift is intended to help the museum boost holdings in prints and drawings and Asian art, two areas in which previous Edinburg gifts were deemed a "transformative" contribution, Druick said.



In total she gave the Art Institute some 1,500 works over the past quarter-century, but the largest single art gift, in 2013, consisted of almost 800 works on paper, mostly European prints and drawings from across the time spectrum, plus 150 Asian works that included stoneware and porcelains.



Edinburg and the Art Institute considered their relationship a "partnership," Druick said. "After meeting her in 1991 we worked with her on a monthly if not a weekly basis," he said. "She would continue her purchases of works of art but making them with a view to giving them to us. 'Do you like this? Do you need this?' She was building for our collection with works that particularly attracted her."



To add cash to that legacy will allow the museum to fill in collection gaps and build on strengths, he said.



"If she had left us her collection of works of art alone she would go down in the annals of the Art Institute as one of its most generous benefactors," Druick said. " With this bequest, she's done this extraordinary double duty."