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 81” — 64 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 04:05 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 81
Artist not stated in the record · 1887

Virgin and Child with Four Angels
Gerard David · ca. 1510–15

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

Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633)
Giuliano Finelli · 1631–32

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

Pair of Flintlock Pistols of the Prince of Wales, later George IV (1762–1830)
Durs Egg · hallmarked for 1793–94

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

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

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

Portrait of a Man
Dieric Bouts · ca. 1470

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

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

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

Portrait of a Woman
Frans Hals · ca. 1650, reworked probably 18th century

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

Carlo Rimbotti (1518–1591)
Francesco Salviati (Francesco de' Rossi) · 1548

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

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

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

Portrait of a Young Man
Biagio d'Antonio · probably ca. 1470

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

Portrait of a Man Wearing the Order of the Annunziata of Savoy
French Painter

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. 27 matched · 24 examined · 3 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. 7036580 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 04:05 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.