CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art announced it has received one of the biggest individual gifts in its history, a collection of more than 100 modern European and American paintings, prints and drawings, plus Chinese and Japanese works, valued at more than $100 million.

The collection, assembled over the past 20 years by Clevelanders Joseph and Nancy Keithley, is the biggest single donation in monetary value since the 1958 bequest of $34 million by Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., worth $306 million in 2020 dollars.

The gift represents a major step toward reaching the museum’s goal of adding $1 billion worth of art to its collection by 2027, outlined in its 2017 strategic plan.

In a single stroke, the Keithley collection provides significant depth to a collection that previously covered the evolution of late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-garde styles with strong individual works, but in many cases without multiple examples.

“It’s transformative,’’ museum Director William Griswold said Tuesday at the museum. “When you think about what it does for us, it’s kind of extraordinary.’’

Heather Lemonedes, the museum’s chief curator, said the new gifts will enable the museum to borrow a wider variety of early modern works from other museums, and to expand the breadth of exhibitions.

“We can lend in this area, and lending means borrowing because when museums borrow works, they also lend generously,’’ she said.

Starting Tuesday March 17, the museum will display 15 of the newly acquired works in six galleries, including paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.

A special preview for museum members who present membership cards will begin at 9 a.m. Tuesday, an hour before the museum’s normal 10 a.m. opening.

The entire Keithley exhibition will be the subject of a special exhibition in late 2022, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue.

“We’re excited and we feel very good that people are going to get to see what we’ve enjoyed now for 20 years,’’ Joseph Keithley said Tuesday in a telephone interview.

The donation includes 114 works, of which 97 are outright gifts and 17 are promised. All have been transferred to the museum, it said in a news release.

The biggest category in the gift is works by the Nabis, a short-lived movement of late 19th-century French painters who focused on scenes of domesticity and urban life in a style that emphasized flat, colorful shapes arranged in patterns that at times camouflaged their subjects.

The Keithley paintings track the Nabis painters during the height of their movement in the last decade of the 19th century, and as their work evolved separately in later decades.

Examples include five paintings by Bonnard; four by Vuillard and Maurice Denis; and two by Félix Vallotton.

Also part of the gift are works by American painters Milton Avery, Joan Mitchell, Andrew Wyeth and John Marin, plus works by the French impressionists Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pissarro, the pointillist Henri-Edmond Cross, and Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi.

Other highlights include individual paintings by Matisse and Picasso, plus two by Georges Braque, including a widely reproduced 1906 harbor scene of L’Estaque on the Riviera, painted in his brightly colored “Fauve” or “wild beast’’ style.

Joseph Keithley, trained as an engineer, is the former chairman, president and CEO of Solon-based Keithley Instruments, Inc., which he led for 17 years.

Nancy Keithley has been a trustee of the museum since 2001, and is also a trustee of the Musical Arts Association, which oversees the Cleveland Orchestra.

Joseph Keithley said he enjoyed a windfall in the late 1990s when he sold shares in Keithley Instruments, enabling him and his wife to collect art at a high level.

They had help and advice from several Cleveland museum directors and numerous curators, who, they said, never asked whether the museum would ultimately benefit.

Joseph Keithley said he and his wife are making the gift in part because they have no children and because they are enthusiastic philanthropists.

In 2013 they donated $15 million to establish an institute in their name at the museum and Case Western Reserve University that would train museum directors and curators.

“We think giving money and attention to nonprofits in your community is a good thing to do,’’ he said.

Griswold said the Keithleys first approached him in late November about the potential gift of artworks.

For me, it was very moving,’’ Griswold said. “This is a collection that was assembled with real passion. It’s a life’s work and an amazing legacy. I’m proud and humbled that this should happen now. It would be very difficult to overstate how excited I am about it.”

NOTE: An earlier version of this story said there was one work by Felix Vallotton in the Keithley gift. There are two.