Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “1873 Department of the Interior card plate proof envelope” — 24 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 03:20 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Marble-top table
Theophil Hansen · ca. 1855–65

Washstand (athénienne or lavabo)
Charles Percier · 1800–1814

Recollections of the Great Exhibition
Day & Son, Ltd., London · September 1, 1851

Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso)
Michelangelo Buonarroti · ca. 1510–11

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
Georges Seurat · 1887–88

Scotch Firs, Inveroran
Sir Francis Seymour Haden · 1873

Portrait of Robert Graves, Printseller
Robert Graves · 1827

King Arthur (from the Heroes Tapestries)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1400–1410

Julius Caesar (from the Heroes Tapestries)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1400–1410

The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, 1620
Joseph Andrews · 1869

Philip IV (1605–1665), King of Spain
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) · probably 1624

Trade Card for Samuel P. Avery--Fine Art Room
George Cruikshank · 1873
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 28 matched · 24 examined · 2 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 03:20 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.