When you first glance at the artwork, it gets you right away: a lady strolling while looking at her smartphone, a sight that is all too familiar in today’s world. SMARTPHONES WEREN’T AVAILABLE IN 1890? The picture is said to have been painted by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller sometime between 1850 and 1890. It’s named ‘The Expected One,’ and it depicts a lady strolling along a rough road, clutching a flower in her hand, ‘waiting’ for a young woman.
The young woman is strongly drawn clutching a little rectangular item, startlingly similar to a current smartphone. Despite the fact that some may see a resemblance between the object carried by the young woman and a current smartphone, the truth is that it is a hymnbook, not a technological gadget.
THE ARTWORK. It demonstrates that individuals in today’s culture, which is surrounded by technology objects, view art differently than they did 20, 30, or 50 years ago. If you had presented this scenario to someone 50 years ago, they would have exclaimed, “Oh, look, that must be some kind of future relic…” instead of, “… she is clutching a hymnal or a bible…”
We recently published an article on a painting portraying a seventeenth-century scenario displaying a Native American carrying a technology that, according to many, seems suspiciously similar to a current smartphone. Is this evidence of time travel?
1937 is the year of the painting.
Painting from the year 1670.
In an interview with Motherboard, Dr. Margaret Bruchac of the University of Pennsylvania commented regarding the claimed smartphone in the painting: “It has an odd likeness, both in terms of how it happens and how you focus your attention on a smartphone.”
