The collection itself was donated by Sir William Burrell, a philanthropist shipping merchant, born slap-bang in the middle of the Victorian era when Glasgow was undergoing huge architectural and economic change. He became rich by ordering ships when the economy was going bad, and then using them when times were good - buy cheap and sell dear is the limit of my knowledge of business stuff, so that sounds plausible enough.
Anyway, he was a lifelong collector who bequethed his enormous collection to Glasgow in 1944, with the condition that it be housed somewhere rural, with very specific ToC's. Glasgow is the dear green place, but this was a problem for the post-war Glasgow council, until it acquired Pollock county park (below):
So, that's pretty rural. This was another bequeth, given in 1967.
But even this wasn't quite good enough for the terms and conditions! So, the trustees waived some of the rules to allow it to be used (what with it being perfect an' all). There was then a competition in 1971 to design a building, which was then opened by the queen in 1983.
The Burrell collection holds a vast amount of art, but that isn't all of the actual Burrell collection. Burrell collected so much that one building isn't enough to store it! It's a vast collection of international art, furniture, medieval weapons, ancient Egyptian artifiacts, and sculputres.
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