The Bridge

Major John André has been subjected to multiple forms of reduction: remembered as the tragic spy of popular history or preserved as the handsome, doomed figure of later romantic imagination. Neither recovers the man.

He was an officer, draughtsman, mapmaker, writer, poet, polyglot, painter, artist, theatre-maker, linguist, administrator, and organizer of intelligence. He studied at Göttingen in 1772, moving within the wider intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe—a polymath operating in the absolute prime of his life.

The Collection bears his name, but does not end with him. It follows the larger intellectual world that formed him—and the lives, ideas, objects, and systems through which that world survives.

• Major John André
  Life, work, and historical record → /major-andre

• The Founder’s Foreword
  Why the Collection exists → /the-founders-foreword

• The Collection
  Holdings, scope, and collecting philosophy → /the-collection

• Founder & Curator
  Institutional background and stewardship → /the-founder-curator