Expert finally reveals truth behind 160-year-old painting of 'time traveler' using an 'iPhone'

An art expert has solved the mystery of the 'time-traveling' woman who appears to hold an iPhone in a 160-year-old painting.

The Internet had to do a double take after a 19th century painting went viral when some people spotted what they thought was a very modern smartphone.

The picture in question is The Expected One, painted by Austrian artist Ferdinand George Waldmüller in 1860.

The painting (which you can see in full below) features a woman walking alone in the countryside holding what resembles an iPhone in her hands.

Meanwhile, a man is waiting for her with a flower, but we don’t care about this detail that much.

Back to the time-travelling iPhone, it's on display at the Neue Pinakothek - a museum of 18th and 19th century art in Munich. The object in the woman’s hands caught the attention of a tourist from Glasgow, Peter Russell, who was amongst the first to notice the bizarre detail in Waldmüller’s painting in 2017.

Russell reflected on how perception of an artwork can be altered in relation to the context of fruition in a chat with Vice.

“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."

He continued: "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,” he concluded.

It didn’t matter that most people know the first iPhones were marketed in 2007 given that the painting has gone to spark some bonkers time-travelling theories on Twitter/X, with some maintaining that hopping through centuries is definitely a thing.

Meanwhile, other users held on tightly onto their disbelief and rejected any possibility of a sci-fi explanation behind the painting.

Luckily for us, art expert Gerald Weinpolter has settled the question once and for all. Weinpolter’s beat is 19th and 20th-century art, and he had no doubt as to what object the woman is truly holding in her hands in the painting, which absolutely makes sense given the time of the artwork.

"The girl in this Waldmüller painting is not playing with her new iPhone X but is off to church holding a little prayer book in her hands,” he told Vice, shattering all time-travelling art hypotheses for good.