Artwork Painted In 1860 Shows Woman 'Scrolling On An iPhone'

This is the 19th century painting which appears to show a woman gawping at a mobile phone - 150 years before the iPhone was released.

Painted by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Expected One was completed around the year 1860.

It shows a woman in 1800s garb strolling through a countryside scene, as a would-be suitor waits by the roadside to hand her a rose.

But he'll be lucky if she even clocks him kneeling there - since she appears to be glued to an iPhone.

In fact, for all we know, she could be swiping through Tinder, so he may as well sack it off completely.

Retired Glasgow local government officer Peter Russell was the first one to clock the weird detail in the painting, hanging at the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich.

Taking to Twitter, Peter shared his incredible spot in response to another story about mobile phones cropping up in historical scenes.

But while some people reckon that this "time-travelling" damsel could be the real deal, others have worked out a far more likely explanation.

Unfortunately, the lady in the painting isn't gawping at an iPhone.

She's just engrossed in a plain old hymn book.

Russell told Motherboard: "What strikes me most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting, and in a way has leveraged its entire context.

"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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Via The Sun UK