Built in Indo-Saracenic style, it houses rare European and Asian painting of renowned artists, including that of Raja Ravi Varma.

The Government Museum Complex also houses the Connemara Public Library and the National Art Gallery.

In August 1778, the governor of Madras granted 43 acres for an estate to a civil servant, who, subsequently in 1793, assigned the grounds to a committee of 24 which then regulated the public amusements in the city.

"[6] The museum was originally established in a building on College Road in Nungambakkam in the year 1851 and was shifted to the present site in 1854.

The core of the old museum building includes the only surviving remnants of the Pantheon, identified from the broad steps leading into it when viewed from the north.

Amongst the additions is the Connemara Public Library, built with stained glass windows, ornate woodwork and elaborate stucco decorations, formally opened in 1896 and named after its progenitor.

The building was built by Namberumal Chetty and was designed by Henry Irwin, with the interiors resembling those of Bank of Madras (SBI).

The design included a huge reading room with a wooden ceiling between two curved rows of stained glass, supported by ornate pillars and arches embellished with sculpted acanthus leaves.

The museum, the first government-sponsored one in the country, opened the same year on the first floor of the college of Fort St. George, adjacent to the Literary Society in Nungambakkam, with an exhibit of nearly 20,000 freely gifted specimens ranging from rocks to books.

When the mounting collection of geological specimens threatened the stability of this first floor, the museum's first officer-in-charge, Surgeon Edward Balfour, who was then president of the Literary Society and serving the museum in an honorary capacity, suggested moving to a new building, which was materialised in 1854 with the move to the Pantheon.

In 1864, an upper storey was added to the Pantheon in sympathetic style, giving the museum more elbow room.

The zoo was later made a separate institution and was shifted to the People's Park in 1863 where it remained, not growing very much, until it was moved to its present location at Vandalur in 1985.

Located close to the main museum entrance gates on Pantheon Road, the museum theatre is a rare specimen of the Italianate style of architecture, inspired by Classical architecture and developed in 1802 at Britain by John Nash.