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 “Design for a Dresser and Chair” — 24 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 06:05 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.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.

Quilt, Album pattern
Brown and Turner families · begun 1846

Chair
Christopher Dresser · 1870

Spoon holder
Christopher Dresser · ca. 1878–81

Chair
Herter Brothers · 1877–79

Armchair (Fauteuil à la reine) for Louise-Élisabeth of Parma
Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot · ca. 1749

Toast rack
Christopher Dresser · 1881

Tapestry Room from Croome Court
Robert Adam · 1763–71

Armchair (one of a set of six)
John Mayhew · 1769–71

Toast rack
Christopher Dresser · 1878

Settee (one of a pair)
John Mayhew · 1769–71

Teapot
Christopher Dresser · ca. 1879

Vase with handles
Christopher Dresser · ca. 1882
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. 22429 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. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-04 06:05 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.