Cupid Resting, after a painting formerly attributed to Rembrandt

What this status means

Smithsonian labels these records CC0, not “public domain.” CC0 is a dedication: the rights holder waives the rights it held. That is public-domain-equivalent in effect, but it is not the same legal mechanism as a copyright term that expired — it is a live, affirmative act by a rights holder rather than the passage of time. OpenGlyph reports the field as it is written rather than flattening it into a term determination.

Where the status came from

OpenGlyph holds no verdict of its own for this object. It queried Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu) and read content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access, which returned CC0. If that field had said anything else, the record would not have rendered at all — non-qualifying objects are dropped before a page exists for them.

That query ran at 2026-08-26 04:08 UTC, not when you loaded this page: the archive’s answer is kept for 24 hours and replayed, which is what keeps repeated views off Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. What is stored is the archive’s own answer, unmodified — but it is that answer as of the time above, and the institution may have revised the record since.

What this does not cover

Copyright only, and only in the United States. It says nothing about trademark, which is a separate regime that survives a work leaving copyright. It covers the file the archive published, not later restorations, colourisations, crops, or reproductions, each of which can carry a new copyright of its own. Outside the US, most countries measure from the life of the author rather than a fixed publication date, so the answer can differ.

The download link points at the archive’s own file, served from ids.si.edu — OpenGlyph does not re-host it, re-encode it, or strip its provenance.