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 “Letter to Rachel Walters from David Walters” — 24 records examined, 4 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 09:46 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.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.

Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750)
Rachel Ruysch · 1692

The Death of Socrates
Jacques Louis David · 1787

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
Gerard David · ca. 1512–15

Virgin and Child with Four Angels
Gerard David · ca. 1510–15

The Third-Class Carriage
Honoré Daumier · 1864

Lute Player
Valentin de Boulogne · ca. 1625–26

Plate with David Slaying a Lion
Artist not stated in the record · 629–630

The Love Letter
Jean Honoré Fragonard · early 1770s

Christ Carrying the Cross, with the Crucifixion; The Resurrection, with the Pilgrims of Emmaus
Gerard David · ca. 1510

Archangel Gabriel; The Virgin Annunciate
Gerard David · ca. 1510

Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Botanist
David Bailly · 1641

The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard
Gerard David · ca. 1510–15
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. 840 matched · 24 examined · 4 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 2026-08-27 09:46 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.