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. 24 shown for “3c Washington type II on Confederate cover” — 64 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 23:03 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Saint John on Patmos
Hans Baldung (called Hans Baldung Grien) · ca. 1511

3c Washington type II on Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · May 13, 1861

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage
Edgar Degas · ca. 1874

3c Washington on Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · May 25, 1861

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Gerard David · ca. 1512–15

3c Washington on Confederate Civil War Patriotic cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1861-1865

Boating
Edouard Manet · 1874

3c Washington on Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1861

Shield cover
Chimú artist(s) · 1350–1470 CE

3c Washington single on Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · May 2, 1861

The Card Players
Paul Cézanne · 1890–92

Civil War Cover
Artist not stated in the record · February 16, 1861

The Marriage Feast at Cana
Juan de Flandes · ca. 1497

3c Washington single on cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1861

The Death of Socrates
Jacques Louis David · 1787

3c Washington on Union cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1862

Virgin and Child
Dieric Bouts · ca. 1455–60

3c Washington Treasury Department cover
Artist not stated in the record · Aug 11, 1875

The Brioche
Edouard Manet · 1870

3c Washington Treasury Department cover front
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

Oedipus and the Sphinx
Gustave Moreau · 1864

3c Washington D Grill cover
Artist not stated in the record · April 6, 1868

An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child
Léon Bonnat · 1869–70

Confederate cover
Artist not stated in the record · Postmark: March 4, 1861
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. 453 matched · 24 examined · 3 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. 7365875 matched · 40 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-31 23:03 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.