The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris has received an “extraordinarily generous” donation of 61 works by Henri Matisse that have been kept in the artist’s family.

Most of the donated art – which includes paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs and a sculpture – features the painter’s daughter Marguerite.

The donation, described by the museum as exceptional and historic, was made by Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Matisse’s grandson Claude, who died in 2011 in New York.

Many of the works had been loaned to the MAM for its Matisse et Marguerite exhibition last year, but the museum said Duthuit’s decision to allow them to keep them was a complete surprise. In 2013, Duthuit gave the Pompidou Centre Marguerite with a Black Cat, one of Matisse’s best known portraits of his daughter.

Marguerite, who was Matisse’s favourite subject, was born during his relationship with one of his models, Caroline Joblau, when he was studying art in Paris. The artist recognised the child and brought Marguerite to live with his new family, including her half-brothers Jean and Pierre, when he married four years later.

Aged six, Marguerite contracted diphtheria and had an emergency tracheotomy. For many years she would disguise the scar with high-necked blouses or ribbons, as the portraits show, until she underwent an operation to repair it when she was 26.

Although her health remained fragile, Marguerite joined the French resistance during the second world war, was tortured by the Gestapo, and was threatened with deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

She had taken up painting and was included in group exhibitions during the war, but gave it up to devote herself to being her father’s assistant and agent until his death at 84, in November 1954. She was still cataloguing her father’s work when she died in Paris in 1982, aged 87.

Matisse preferred to keep his art in the family rather than sell it, making the donation particularly significant. The 61 pieces will join the 20 Matisse artworks already held by the museum.

Fabrice Hergott, MAM’s director, described the portraits of Marguerite as “extremely beautiful and moving”.

“This extraordinarily generous gesture testifies to Madame Duthuit’s deep commitment to and confidence in the museum, which effectively becomes Marguerite’s new home for the decades and centuries to come,” he said.