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. 12 shown for “Cabinet card of Maggie J. Sims” — 24 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-06 04:02 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.

The Toilet of Bathsheba

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) · 1643

Public domainThe Met

John J. Healey, Pitcher, Indianapolis, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes

Goodwin & Company · 1887

Public domainThe Met

J. Boyle, Catcher, St. Louis Browns, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes

Goodwin & Company · 1887–89

Public domainThe Met

Casket with scenes from the Story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

Artist not stated in the record · 1670s

Public domainThe Met

J.M. Ward, Shortstop, New York, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes

Goodwin & Company · 1887

Public domainThe Met

J.E. O'Neil, Left Field, St. Louis Browns, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes

Goodwin & Company · 1888

Public domainThe Met

Richard J. Malone

Lena Bradley · 1880s–90s

Public domainThe Met

[Merchants' Carnival Portrait: J. W. Butler]

Unknown · 1880s–1890s

Public domainThe Met

[Merchants' Carnival Portrait: J. Minette, Nelson, Nebraska]

Howard · 1880s–1890s

Public domainThe Met

[Merchants' Carnival Portrait: B.J. Marsh Photography Studio, Norton, Kansas]

B. J. Marsh · 1880s–1890s

Public domainThe Met

[Merchants' Carnival Portrait: W. S. Wadsworth Shoes, Lake Mills, Iowa]

T. J. Helgeson · 1880s–1890s

Public domainThe Met

[Merchants' Carnival Portrait: Dr. Dolan, Waterville, Minnesota]

Elijah J. Christman · 1880s–1890s

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. 54 matched · 24 examined · 1 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 2026-09-06 04:02 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 index0 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.