The Cleveland Museum of Art on Friday announced that it had acquired of one of the most important collections still in private hands of Deccan and Mughal painting from India’s major Islamic courts of the 16th century through the late 18th century.

The collection, amassed over 50 years by Ralph Benkaim, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who died in 2001, and his wife, Catherine Glynn Benkaim, a curator and scholar of Indian art, will transform the museum’s Indian and Southeast Asian galleries, reopening Dec. 31 as part of a $350 million expansion of the museum, into one of the world’s major centers for Indian Islamic painting.

The museum has struggled in recent months since the resignation of its director, David Franklin, after revelations about an affair with a museum staff member who committed suicide in April 2013. The news has at times threatened to overshadow the completion of the museum’s eight-year renovation and expansion project, one of the most ambitious in the country, a project that has come with many significant additions to the museum’s collection.

The museum has long been known for its Indian and Southeast Asian holdings. But Sonya Quintanilla, the department’s curator, said that paintings were a weak spot. “There weren’t enough works so that a coherent story could be told about one of India’s most important traditions, its paintings tradition,” she said.

Ms. Benkaim had not been expected to part with her collection during her lifetime. But Ms. Quintanilla said that a combination of Cleveland’s desire for a major Indian acquisition for the department’s reopening and Ms. Benkaim’s wish to keep her collection intact led her to look east. “She wanted to know it would be in a place where it would be appreciated and used and where it would make a real difference,” Ms. Quintanilla said.

The acquisition, paid for partly by an anonymous donor, includes 95 works, among them a portrait from an album in the collection of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who was responsible for the building of the Taj Mahal.

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