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 “James William Cook” — 24 records examined, 7 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 15:12 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.

Toki (ceremonial adze)
Cook Islands artist · early 19th century

Roubiliac with the Model for Garrick's Shakespeare (Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting in England," vol. 4)
James William Cook · 1827

The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox
William Hogarth · 1729

Saint James the Greater
Gil de Siloe · 1489–93

Whalers
Joseph Mallord William Turner · ca. 1845

Appliqué Figure of the Apostle James
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1350

Captain James Cook
Wedgwood and Bentley · late 18th century

William Fraser of Reelig (1784–1835)
Sir Henry Raeburn · 1801

The Bryant Vase
Tiffany & Co. · 1876

Apostle spoon: St. James the Great
William Cawdell · 1592/93

Apostle spoon: St. James the Less
William Cawdell · 1592/93

The Death of Captain Cook
Francesco Bartolozzi · 1785
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. 4660 matched · 24 examined · 7 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 15:12 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.