A painting from the 1860s has a detail seemingly swiped from modern times: a woman hunched and walking with her eyes seemingly glued to a phone.
As a man crouches in wait to spring a flower on her, she doesn’t even look up.
Yup, nothing really seems to have changed beyond the nineteenth century garments.
Glaswegian Peter Russell spotted the ‘iPhone’ on a visit to the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich where the painting – The Expected One by Ferdinand George Waldmüller – hangs.
Peter A. Russell2291@Planet_PedroJust like her on the dating app in Walmüller’s Die Erwartete (c. 1850):
But it turns out she is not a bored time-traveller swiping her way through historical Tinder (we bet that’s a wasteland). Rather, she is engrossed in perusing a hymn book, according to the gallery.
Russell, who now occasionally blogs about culture, told Motherboard:
What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has chance the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context.
He added:
The big change is that in 1850 or 1860, every single viewer would have identified the item that the girl is absorbed in as a hymnal or prayer book.
Today, no one could fail to see the resemblance to the scene of a teenage girl absorbed in social media on their smartphone.
