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 “John Penniman” — 47 records examined, 35 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 13:21 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Tall Clock
Thomas Seymour · 1805–10

Christ Tempted by the Devil
John Ritto Penniman, born Milford, MA 1782-died Baltimore, MD 1841 · 1818

Bedstead
Thomas Seymour · 1810–15

Classical Landscape
John Ritto Penniman, born Milford, MA 1782-died Baltimore, MD 1841 · 1822-1826

Novelty Iron works, Foot of 12th St. E.R. New York. Stillman, Allen & Co., Iron Founders, Steam Engine and General Machinery Manufacturers
John Penniman · 1842–55

(Scene from Don Quixote)
John Ritto Penniman, born Milford, MA 1782-died Baltimore, MD 1841 · 1816

Panel with John the Baptist and other saints
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century
Cyrtandra halawensis Rock
Artist not stated in the record · 22 Jul 2008

Looking Glass
John Doggett · 1810–20

Thevetia peruviana (Pers.) K. Schum.
Artist not stated in the record · 27 Oct 2009

Nahant Hotel/ near/ Boston
Joseph Stubbs · ca. 1825–ca. 1836
![[American naval monument]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.metmuseum.org%2FCRDImages%2Fad%2Fweb-large%2F24823.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
[American naval monument]
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1816–ca. 1830
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. 7 matched · 7 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.7 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 260384 matched · 40 examined · 35 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.5 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-28 13:21 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.