150 year old painting appears to show a woman using an iPhone

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.

Picture: Hajotthu / Wikimedia CommonsHajotthu / Wikimedia Commons

This first went viral back in 2017after it was spotted in the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich where the painting - The Expected One by Ferdinand George Waldmüller - hangs.

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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.

Peter Russell, who made the observation 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."

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