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 “City letter carrier cap badge, number 139” — 57 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.
Boy with a Sword
Edouard Manet · 1861

City letter carrier cap badge, number 139
Artist not stated in the record · 1887

Infantry Shield (Pavise)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1450

City letter carrier cap badge, number 15
N. C. Walter and Sons · 1968

Cylinder seal cap
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 17th–16th century BCE

City letter carrier cap badge, number 1
Artist not stated in the record · 1955

Portrait of a Woman and an Enslaved Servant
Nicolas de Largillierre (or Largillière) · 1696

City letter carrier cap badge, number 2
Artist not stated in the record · 1955

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) · 1653

City letter carrier cap badge, number 1504
Artist not stated in the record · 1955

Paris
Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi) · ca. 1518–1524

City letter carrier cap badge, number 224
Artist not stated in the record · 1887

The Abduction of the Sabine Women
Nicolas Poussin · probably 1633–34

City letter carrier cap badge, number 518
N. C. Walter and Sons · 1922

Benedikt von Hertenstein (born about 1495, died 1522)
Hans Holbein the Younger · 1517

City letter carrier cap badge, number 6
N. C. Walter and Sons · 1968

Hermann von Wedigh III (died 1560)
Hans Holbein the Younger · 1532

City letter carrier cap badge, number 81
Artist not stated in the record · 1887

Tommaso di Folco Portinari (1428–1501); Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, born 1456)
Hans Memling · ca. 1470

City letter carrier substitute cap badge, number 447
Artist not stated in the record · 1887

The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment
Jan van Eyck · ca. 1436–38

City letter carrier cap badge
Artist not stated in the record · 1877-1922

Portrait of a Venetian Senator
Catena (Vincenzo di Biagio) · ca. 1525

City letter carrier cap badge, number 1
N. C. Walter and Sons · 1922
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. 17 matched · 17 examined · 2 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. 7020632 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 2026-09-01 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.