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. 10 shown for “Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900” — 14 records examined, 4 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-26 17:59 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.

Heart of the Andes
Frederic Edwin Church · 1859

The Parthenon
Frederic Edwin Church · 1871

Eagle relief
Toltec artist(s) · 900–1200 CE

Sky – Northern Cuba
Charles Dewolf Brownell · ca. 1853–66

Peace and Plenty
George Inness · 1865

Lake Como, May 3, 1869 (verso, from sketchbook)
Jervis McEntee · 1869

The White Captive
Erastus Dow Palmer · 1857–58; carved 1858–59

Altar to the Sun Warrior
Mexico Nahua artist(s) · 1450-1521 CE

Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)
Julius Schrader · 1859

Sunset after a Storm on the Coast of Sicily
Andreas Achenbach · 1853
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. 14 matched · 14 examined · 4 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.10 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 2026-08-26 17:59 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.