The Silver World (Gin sekai)
The Silver World (Gin sekai) is a Japanese woodblock picture book of 1790 by Kitagawa Utamaro, a print artist working in Edo, made for a general readership of art and fashion buyers. Its pages show winter scenes and courtly figures in soft, muted colour. A designer might take from them the economical use of snow as empty negative space, the pale grey-beige palette, and the flat layered planes of architecture and pine branches.
