The Long Gallery at Syon House carries a weight of history that its present appearance only partially discloses. Historical tradition holds that in this room, in 1553, Lady Jane Grey was offered the crown of England, a moment that entangles the space in the dynastic turbulence of the mid-Tudor period long before any architect had laid a hand to it. Robert Adam (1728–1792) arrived over two centuries later, commissioned between 1760 and 1769 to redesign the house for Hugh Percy, first Duke of Northumberland (1715–1786), and the gallery he encountered was a seventeenth-century Jacobean library. Adam did not rebuild: the Tudor fabric of Syon remained intact, and his task was to work within and over what was already there.
The changes Adam made to the gallery interior were extensive, though not all of them have survived as he intended. The sombre Jacobean panelling gave way to sixty-two gilded and painted Corinthian pilasters, their surfaces threaded with delicate classical stucco; the room became light, ordered, and deliberately elegant. His original colour scheme of bright pink and pale blue, characteristic of the polychromatic palette he favoured across his domestic interiors, did not stay. The third Duchess applied a green wash in the nineteenth century that muted these vivid tones into the subdued combination visible today, so that what one sees is in part Adam’s architecture and in part a later revision of his intentions. Along the walls, portrait roundels are arranged in two genealogical sequences: Dukes and Duchesses of Northumberland on one side, Earls of Northumberland on the other. The Percy family is announced here, not merely displayed.
The long gallery had a long and varied career in the English great house before Adam encountered the form at Syon. Its earlier character was partly martial, a space for exercise and the display of arms, but by the second half of the eighteenth century that function had largely dissolved. Adam designed this gallery explicitly for the use of the ladies of the household, and the lightened surfaces, restrained ornament, and measured architectural rhythm of the room reflect this intention. Whether that represents a narrowing of the gallery’s ambitions or simply their refinement is a question the room leaves open. What is clear is that Adam brought to an inherited space the full vocabulary of his Neoclassical manner, reading the bones of a Jacobean interior as the material for something altogether different. The Tudor structure endures beneath his plasterwork, and the Percy genealogy claims the walls; Adam’s contribution was to give all of this a new architectural grammar, one drawn from antiquity and applied with the lightness of touch that distinguishes his best interiors.
References
Harris, E. (2001) The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Tait, A.A. (1993) Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Girouard, M. (1978) Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Stillman, D. (1966) The Decorative Work of Robert Adam. London: Tiranti