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 “Julius and Edward Norton” — 64 records examined, 46 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-09 02:48 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Water cooler
Julius and Edward Norton · 1850–59

Edward and Sarah Rutter
Joshua Johnson · ca. 1805

Madonna and Child
Simone Martini · ca. 1326

Sallet in the Shape of a Lion's Head
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1475–80

Portrait of a Carthusian
Petrus Christus · 1446

Panorama of New York and Vicinity
John Bachmann · 1866

Asters and Fruit on a Table
Henri Fantin-Latour · 1868

Equestrian Portrait of Cornelis (1639–1680) and Michiel Pompe van Meerdervoort (1638–1653) with Their Tutor and Coachman
Aelbert Cuyp · ca. 1652–53

Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
Lippo Memmi (Filippo di Memmo) · ca. 1350

The Musicians
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) · 1597

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)
Robert Campin · ca. 1427–32

Kelyaut (frame drum)
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century
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. 286 matched · 24 examined · 6 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. 1572537 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-09 02:48 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.