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 “Gibson & Co. Lithography, active 1850 - 1895” — 40 records examined, 6 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-06 16:46 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Elmer E. Ellsworth
Gibson & Co. Lithography, active 1850 - 1895 · c. 1862-64

Winfield Scott
Gibson & Co. Lithography, active 1850 - 1895 · c. 1862-64

Andrew Johnson
Gibson & Co. Lithography, active 1850 - 1895 · c. 1865

The Attorney
Max Rosenthal, 23 Nov 1833 - 8 Aug 1918 · 1851

Temple at Tumai Lew Chew
James Ackerman Lithography Co., active 1845 - 1859 · 1856

Encampment of the Exploring Party in Lew Chew
P. S. Duval & Son Lithography Co., active 1838 - 1869 · 1856

General Winfield Scott
A. Winch · c. 1861-64

Possibly E. L. Snow
Francis D'Avignon, 29 Oct 1813 - c. 1871 · c. 1847

Franklin Pierce
Benjamin W. Thayer Lithography Co., active 1840 - 1853 · c. 1852

Franklin Pierce
Benjamin W. Thayer Lithography Co., active 1840 - 1853 · c. 1847-52

John Pendleton Kennedy
Leopold Grozelier, 1830 - 1865 · c. 1850-53

Etienne Derbec
A. De Lattre, active c. 1850 · c. 1850
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 57734 matched · 40 examined · 6 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 2026-09-06 16:46 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.