OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

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 “Figure: within a closed shrine” — 40 records examined, 14 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-03 21:20 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Figure: within a closed shrine

Figure: within a closed shrine

Artist not stated in the record · late 17th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Hilltop View of Yushima Tenjin Shrine (Yushima Tenji, Sakaue-chobo) No. 117 From the Series One Hundred Famous views of Edo, by Hiroshi Awatsuji, Japanese, 1929–1995

Hilltop View of Yushima Tenjin Shrine (Yushima Tenji, Sakaue-chobo) No. 117 From the Series One Hundred Famous views of Edo

Hiroshi Awatsuji, Japanese, 1929–1995 · 1865

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
shrine, votive with figure of four-armed Ganesha

shrine, votive with figure of four-armed Ganesha

Artist not stated in the record · 12th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Amitabha (Amida), contained within a closed shrine

Amitabha (Amida), contained within a closed shrine

Artist not stated in the record · 1615-1868

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Former Hachiman Shrine, Sunamura (Sunamura Moto-Hachiman) From the Series One Hundred Famous views of Edo, by Ando Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797–1858

Former Hachiman Shrine, Sunamura (Sunamura Moto-Hachiman) From the Series One Hundred Famous views of Edo

Ando Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797–1858 · 1856

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Shrine and figure

Shrine and figure

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1640

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Votive Tabernacle Shrine

Votive Tabernacle Shrine

Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Head, by Nomoli Style

Head

Nomoli Style · 15th-17th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Square

Square

Artist not stated in the record · 5th–6th century

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Balaenoptera acutorostrata Lacepede, 1804

Balaenoptera acutorostrata Lacepede, 1804

Artist not stated in the record · 29 May 1972

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Allegorical Figures Representing the Four Continents, by Mademoiselle Dobe, French, active ca. 1736

Allegorical Figures Representing the Four Continents

Mademoiselle Dobe, French, active ca. 1736 · 1736

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Apollonius Curing a Young Athenian Possessed of a Demon [above]; Apollonius Raising a Girl from the Dead in Rome [below], by Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, Flemish, 1523–1605

Apollonius Curing a Young Athenian Possessed of a Demon [above]; Apollonius Raising a Girl from the Dead in Rome [below]

Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, Flemish, 1523–1605 · ca. 1597

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
What was queried

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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1788825 matched · 40 examined · 14 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 2026-09-03 21:20 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.