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 “Archibald Robertson, born Moneymusk, Scotland-died New York City 1835” — 18 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-02 16:29 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.

William Loughton Smith
Archibald Robertson · ca. 1795

Pierre Van Cortlandt Jr.
Archibald Robertson · ca. 1795

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)
Archibald Robertson · 1786–91

Portrait of a Gentleman
Archibald Robertson · ca. 1795

William Udall
Archibald Robertson · ca. 1800–1805

James Smith Livingston
Archibald Robertson · ca. 1795

Grand Canal Celebration: View of the Fleet Preparing to Form in Line
Anthony Imbert · 1825

Collect Pond, New York City
Archibald Robertson · 1798

First Infant School in Green Street, New York
Anthony Imbert · 1828

Portrait of a Man
Andrew Robertson · 1828

The Forest in Winter at Sunset
Théodore Rousseau · ca. 1846–67

The Coronation of the Virgin
Annibale Carracci · after 1595
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. 18 matched · 18 examined · 0 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 2026-09-02 16:29 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.