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 “Film still for The Emperor Jones” — 24 records examined, 8 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 06:36 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.

Vanitas Still Life
Jacques de Gheyn II · 1603

Marble portrait head of the Emperor Constantine I
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 325–370 CE

The Honorable Henry Fane (1739–1802) with Inigo Jones and Charles Blair
Sir Joshua Reynolds · 1761–66

Stained Glass Panel with Emperor Henry II
Artist not stated in the record · 1340–50

The Harvesters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1565

Vitellius tazza
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1587–99, foot added after mid-19th century

Emperor Antoninus Pius
Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi) · 1519–24

Pair-case quarter-repeating watch
John Champion · ca. 1770–72

Saint Reparata before the Emperor Decius
Bernardo Daddi · ca. 1338–40

Violoncello
Jean Baptiste Vuillaume · mid-19th century

Cornice Block with Relief Depicting the Purification of the Pharaoh
Artist not stated in the record · 41–68 CE

Brooch with Intaglio of an Emperor
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 950–1000 (setting); 337–50 (intaglio)
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. 368 matched · 24 examined · 8 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 2026-08-28 06:36 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.