Images / art

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. 10 shown for “Alexander Gardner, 17 Oct 1821 - 10 Dec 1882” — 10 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-28 01:04 UTC · fetched live for this request

Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.

Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

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.

Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, Volume 1

Alexander Gardner · 1863

Public domainThe Met

Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, Volume 2

Alexander Gardner · 1863

Public domainThe Met

[Antietam Battlefield]

Alexander Gardner · 1862

Public domainThe Met

Execution of the Conspirators

Alexander Gardner · July 7, 1865

Public domainThe Met

[Lewis Payne (Lewis Powell), Lincoln Assassination Conspirator, in Sweater, Seated and Manacled on the USS Saugus, Washington Navy Yard]

Alexander Gardner · April 1865

Public domainThe Met

Brigadier General Gustavus A. DeRussy and Staff on Steps of Arlington House, Arlington, Virginia

Alexander Gardner · May 1864

Public domainThe Met

Military Telegraphic Corps, Army of the Potomac, Berlin, October 1862

Alexander Gardner · 1862

Public domainThe Met

Lewis Powell [alias Lewis Payne]

Alexander Gardner · April 27, 1865

Public domainThe Met

Chief Officer and Clerks of the Ambulance Department, 9th Army Corps, in Front of Petersburg, Virginia

Timothy H. O'Sullivan · August 1864

Public domainThe Met

Table clock with calendar

Lucien Falize · 1881

Public domainThe Met

What was queried

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. 10 matched · 10 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.10 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 2026-08-28 01:04 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.

Read the method

Elsewhere in the catalogue

Section 01Character index6 hand-compiled entries, each with sources, version scope, and a confidence value.Section 02NewsWhat has already cleared the US term, and what clears next — January 1, 2027.Section 03MethodThree status values, three confidence values, and copyright kept apart from trademark.