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. 15 shown for “David G. Venable's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model” — 43 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 01:51 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Young Lady in 1866
Edouard Manet · 1866

David G. Venable's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

Saint Jerome as Scholar
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) · ca. 1610

Henry G. Sellman's 1871 Improved Frame for School Desk and Seat Patent Model fragment
Artist not stated in the record · 1871

The Natchez
Eugène Delacroix · 1823–24 and 1835

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

Milan C. Stebbin and Edwin J. Piper's 1873 School Desk Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

Albert E. Robert's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model, missing back
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

David I. Stagg's 1866 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1866

John L. Riter's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

Charles H. Presbrey's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

John Peard's 1873 School Tablet Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873

David I. Stagg's 1875 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1875

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

Francis A Wilber's 1873 School Desk and Seat Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1873
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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.3 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2225195 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 01:51 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.