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. 19 shown for “Charles J. Higgins's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model” — 47 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 04:07 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)
Auguste Renoir · 1878

Charles J. Higgins's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)
Edgar Degas · 1865

Charles J. Higgins's 1873 School Desk Patent Model Leg Support
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

The Dance Class
Edgar Degas · 1874

Charles J. Higgins's 1871 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1871

Portrait of a Young Man; (reverse) Girl Making a Garland
Hans Süss von Kulmbach · ca. 1508

Morris Lancaster's 1876 School Desk and Seat Hinge Improvement Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)
Thomas Gainsborough · 1787

George W. Puterbaugh and Alfred Teal's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

The Brioche
Edouard Manet · 1870

William F. Spencer's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

Don Andrés de Andrade y la Cal
Bartolomé Estebán Murillo · ca. 1665–72

Eldridge J. Smith's 1872 School Desk and Seat Patent Model fragment
Artist not stated in the record · 1872

Fernando Dibble's 1867 School Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1867

Aaron W. Hempleman's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

Samuel Crumrine's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

William Kline, John Upham, and S. D. Tuttle's 1876 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1876

Charles F. Hill's 1879 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1879
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. 7 matched · 7 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.7 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2601202 matched · 40 examined · 2 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 2026-09-01 04:07 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.