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. 24 shown for “Hokusai” — 64 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-26 04:04 UTC · served from cache, not re-queried for this request

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.

Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), or The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)

Katsushika Hokusai · ca. 1830–32

Public domainThe Met

Two Entertainers Strolling on the New Year

Attributed to Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1798-1801

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Random Sketches by Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai · probably 1834

Public domainThe Met

Bridge at Yedo

Katsushika Hokusai, 1760 – 1849 · 1760-1849

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Pitcher

Gorham Manufacturing Company · 1882

Public domainThe Met

Various Scenes

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1810-1820

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Various Pictures by Hokusai (Hokusai soga) 北斎麁画

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 · 1820 (Bunsei 3)

Public domainThe Met

Boy Playing Flute

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1840

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Various Pictures by Hokusai (Hokusai soga) 北斎麁画

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 · 1820

Public domainThe Met

Two women viewing the scenery

Katsushika Hokusai, 1760 – 1849 · 1760-1849

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 6 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, rokuhen)

Katsushika Hokusai

Public domainThe Met

Various Faces

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1830

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 3 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, sanpen)

Katsushika Hokusai

Public domainThe Met

Breaking Waves

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · 1847

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 11 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, jūichihen)

Katsushika Hokusai

Public domainThe Met

Landscape

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1801-1802

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 12 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, jūnihen)

Katsushika Hokusai · 1834

Public domainThe Met

Woodcutter

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · 1849

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 8 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, hachihen)

Katsushika Hokusai · 1817

Public domainThe Met

Four fan paintings mounted on a screen; "Frog on Lotus Leaf", "Scholar in a House", "Landscape", and "Boat and Rock"

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · frog, ca.1814-15; scholar, ca. 1801-03; landscape, ca. 1825-30; boat, ca.1841

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 9 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, kyūhen)

Katsushika Hokusai · 1819

Public domainThe Met

Lady Holding a Cat

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1810s

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

Transmitting the Spirit, Revealing the Form of Things: Hokusai Sketchbooks, volume 13 (Denshin kaishu: Hokusai manga, jūsanpen)

Katsushika Hokusai · ca. 1849

Public domainThe Met

Shojo Lifting a Sake Keg

Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849) · ca. 1840s

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. 584 matched · 24 examined · 0 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. 184 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-08-26 04:04 UTC, replayed here rather than repeated. 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.

Read the method

Elsewhere in the catalogue

Section 01Character index6 hand-compiled entries, each with sources, version scope, and a confidence value.Section 02NewsWhat has already cleared the US term, and what clears next — January 1, 2027.Section 03MethodThree status values, three confidence values, and copyright kept apart from trademark.