SANTA FE, N.M. — Despite competition from both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Fe’s Museum of Spanish Colonial Art has landed the gift of a lifetime.

The Santa Fe museum will be the permanent home of the 60-piece collection of Peruvian Spanish Colonial art from the estate of Pedro Gerardo Beltrán Espantoso, the former prime minister of Peru (from 1959-1961) and his wife Miriam Kropp Beltrán.

The donated art includes such important pieces as a rare eglomise (reverse painting on glass) of the Madonna and Child, a silver panel of Abraham, Isaac and an angel and a table with marquetry of incised ivory and tortoise shell.

The items are estimated at from 50 to 300 years old.

The collection also includes the entire set of Beltrán custom-made and engraved cobalt blue and gold dinner service for 46.

“This is huge for us –– huge,” said Donna Pedace, director of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, which operates the museum on Museum Hill. “It’s not often we get items from the prime minister of a country. It’s the largest gift of colonial art we’ve ever received.”

The society, which produces Santa Fe’s annual summer and winter traditional Spanish Markets, has existed for 87 years, and the museum opened in 2002.

The pieces in the Beltrán collection have never before been displayed to the public. The Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts will exhibit the collection in June 2013.

The institutions that the Santa Fe museum won out over for the donation also included the Brooklyn Museum of Art and 17 others.

Pedace said the Santa Fe museum’s sole focus on Spanish Colonial art gave it an edge. The collection would have been just a fraction of the holdings of museums the size of the Met, likely relegated to a department, she said.

The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art is the only museum and conservation facility in the U.S. devoted exclusively to historic art of the Spanish colonies.

The John Gaw Meem-designed building, which was commissioned in 1953 by John D. Rockefeller as the home of the director of the nearby Laboratory of Anthropology, houses more than 3,700 unique art objects.

Up until now, the Santa Fe museum’s collection has been predominately composed of art from New Mexico, Pedace said, although there were scattered pieces from the colonies.

“Our mission for 87 years has been to preserve, promote and educate the public about the art forms of the Spanish colonies,” she said.

When the competing museums learned they would not receive the collection, they tried to bid on the rare eglomise painting, she added.

Pedro Beltrán was a descendent of a Spanish conquistador and a member of the Peruvian aristocracy. Educated at the London School of Economics, he returned to Peru and was involved in business and politics before becoming the owner and publisher of the once-prominent newspaper La Prensa from 1934 to 1974.

Beltrán was the minister of finance and prime minister of Peru from 1959-1961. He received honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard and the University of California and was a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia. He was also awarded the Maria Moors Cabot prize from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

The Inter-American Press Society honored him as a “Hero of Freedom of the Press” for his opposition to the Manuel Odria dictatorship in the 1950s.

In 1974, the Beltráns relocated to Miriam’s family home on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. They continued to travel the world and spent considerable amount of time in Europe until Pedro’s 1979 death.

Miriam Kropp Beltrán died in 2010. A family friend and attorney placed the works in a New York Christie’s viewing in November and made the final decision.

“Christie’s did give them an appraisal,” Pedace said. “We do not have that.”