The Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum greets the street with a massive stone portico supported by eight heavy Corinthian columns. It houses the art and antiquities collection of the University of Cambridge, established in eighteen sixteen through a bequest from Richard, the seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam. He left his entire library and art gallery to the university on one condition: it had to remain open to the public. John Adey Repton designed the shell, but George Basevi spent the next twenty-eight years trying to finish it.