Illustrators on the Road from the Renaissance to the Present Day

Grand voyages of discovery overseas, illustrated maps of distant lands, as well as sketchbooks from trips to cities and forests… Whether drawing on the road stems from the need to record serious scientific discoveries or simply from the joy of drawing and traveling itself, the resulting works tend to have something in common: they carry the scent of faraway places and lure us beyond the horizon. This exhibition of travel diaries, maps, and guidebooks brings together the work of contemporary illustrators with drawings from the journeys of Renaissance and Baroque travelers, scholars, missionaries, and cartographers who yearned to document foreign lands, their fauna, flora, and human customs.

Alongside a travelogue from Alexandre de Rogissart’s Grand Tour of Italy in the early 18th century, you can see drawings from Italian trips by the young Slovak illustrator Lívia Suchá. Prints from the atlas of the first Icelandic publisher are displayed next to illustrations of Iceland from the Atlas of the World by Nikola Logosová, a fixture of the Czech illustration scene. Records from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem undertaken by Christopher Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice in 1598 stand together with large-format prints inspired by coastal cities visited in recent years by Laura Hédervári. You will find drawings of the New World as captured by the English scholar Thomas Harriot at the end of the 16th century, and by the Chomutov-born missionary Ignaz Tirsch in the second half of the 18th century. These are complemented by illustrations from a book about the Czech Enlightenment traveler Thaddaeus Haenke, captured just a few years ago by the young illustrator Filip Šenkeřík. The exhibition also features more or less descriptive maps created by current students of the Studio of Illustration and Graphics at UMPRUM in Prague, travel sketchbooks by their teacher Michaela Kukovičová, and maps of imaginary lands that set the stage for comic stories by Matyáš Namai. So, bon voyage!

Exhibiting artists: Jakub Čapka, Františka Čapková, Klára Čmejrková, Šimon Fibrich, Laura Hédervári, Eliáš Hradil, Michaela Kukovičová, Nikola Logosová, Matyáš Namai, Anna Neumann, Klára Smeykalová, Finn Stiller, Lívia Suchá, Filip Šenkeřík & historical book and map illustrations by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Heinrich Bünting, Christopher Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice, Thomas Harriot, Ólafur Ólafsson, Alexandre de Rogissart, Salomon Schweigger, and Ignaz Tirsch from the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic.

Curator: Barbora Müllerová

The exhibition is held in cooperation with LUSTR International Festival of Illustration and Comics and the National Library of the Czech Republic, with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the State Culture Fund of the Czech Republic.

Exhibition Tour Schedule

July 3 – August 1, 2026 | Hejnice Monastery, Cloister
August 1, 2026 at 2:00 PM | Exhibition guided tour, Hejnice

August 10 – 23, 2026 | State Regional Archives in Třeboň in cooperation with the Vidiny Festival
August 10 | Exhibition guided tour, Třeboň