This year we commemorate the 145th anniversary of the birth of the Czech painter and graphic artist Jan Honsa, a pupil of Mařák's famous landscape school at the Prague Academy. As the subtitle of the exhibition suggests, he has been a loner since his youth, who, except his studies, several study trips abroad and more or less forced stay in Prague during the war, lived all his life in Běstovice u Chocně and the local region became his source of his lifelong artistic inspiration.

He was able to capture its simple character and mood, especially in forest motifs, in panoramic and idyllic landscapes with flowering trees and typical country cottages. He created a completely distinctive and unmistakable painting style, characterized by vivid colors and combining European impressionist to pointillist technique with stylized elements of purely Czech rural Art Nouveau, referring to the decorative motifs of folk furniture and color printing. His paintings, celebrating mainly the landscape of Eastern Bohemia and the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, are rightly called one of the most original interpretations of Impressionism in Czech art. Through his experiments in graphics and painting, he achieved remarkable results that rank this artist among the important creators of his time.
The exhibition is a cross-section of the work of this forgotten Czech landscape painter and follows the gradual development of his painting style. Honsa‘s work based on constant and deep contact with nature, in which he grew up, lived and worked, is presented on a selected set of paintings, drawings and graphics from public galleries and private collections. The aim of this exhibition is to present his work as a reflection of his life and artistic journey, his successes, tireless search, experiments and the sad conclusion of life in voluntary isolation.