“the expected“it’s a beautiful frame painted by austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller in 1860 which depicts a simple scene taking place in the field: a young woman walking in the woods is about to be surprised by a boy. Hidden further down the path, he holds a pink flower in his hand, presumably planning to declare yourself for her somehow.

As the site of “Die Pinakotheken” (“Old Pinacoteca”, in Portuguese) which is an important german museum located in the city of Munich and the current owner of the artwork, it is a painting that plays with the element of waiting.

And this is not only because of the figure of the boy, who is eagerly waiting to surprise his beloved, but also because of the character himself. viewerwho, faced with this scene of frozen expectation, can only imagine the rest.

The viewer becomes a witness to the scene that awaits. Will the girl return the boy’s feelings?

Interesting as the concept of the screen is, however, it is not its feature that most attracts the attention of a contemporary observerbut the object in the hands of the girl, which looks very much like a cellphone — a technology that, needless to say, certainly did not exist at the time 19th century.

Optical illusion

As the own portal of “Die Pinakotheken“, however, the young woman embodied by Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller would not play with their social networks, but read the verses of a little book.

More precisely, the object represented would be a hinarioIt’s a songbook (usually religious in nature). The context we may not understand looking at the painting today is that the two youngsters would be dressed in ‘Sunday clothes’ so it can be assumed that the girl is on her way to church at the time .

On a summer day, a boy with roses is waiting for his love in the shade of the forest. Coming from lush, rolling fields, the girl approaches the secluded edge of the forest. Both use their sunday clothes. While the boy looks at her with hope, the flower-faced girl contemplates her hymnal,” explains the Munich gallery’s website.

The importance of context

The curious detail was mentioned to Vice, which is a Canadian-American newspaper, by a German who saw the painting in person.

called from Peter Russellthe retired civil servant was fascinated by how the brushstrokes can be seen so differently from their original intent before an observer who belongs to a different time and society than the one in which the work of art was raised.

What strikes me most is how technological change has changed the interpretation of the painting and, in a way, exploited all of its context (…) The great change is that, in 1860, any viewer would have identified the element in which the young girl is absorbed as a hymnal or a book of prayers. Today, no one could fail to see the resemblance to the scene of a teenage girl absorbed in social media on her smartphone,” he pointed out.