18/10/2026
She was painted more than 160 years ago, and the internet is sure she is on her phone.
Look at her. She walks down a country path with her head bowed, eyes fixed on a small dark rectangle in her hands. Online she became the "time traveller with an iPhone", and the picture has gone viral again and again.
The painting is The Expected One by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. It hangs in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, which dates it to 1850 or 1860. Peter Russell, a retired local government official from Glasgow, was one of the people who spotted the resemblance. "What amazes me the most is how much a change in technology has changed the interpretation of the painting," he said.
Because in her own time, nobody would have hesitated. She is wearing her Sunday clothes and holding a hymn book on her way to church. Fact checkers at Snopes rated the iPhone story false, and the painting is also known by another title: Sunday Morning.
And here is the part almost everyone misses. In the shade of the trees, a young man is waiting for her with roses in his hand. He is the reason for the title.
She is the one he expects. Yet her eyes are on her little book, not on him.
What do you think people 160 years from now will get wrong about the pictures we leave behind?
The Expected One, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, c. 1860
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