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. 13 shown for “Loescher & Petsch” — 13 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-28 05:01 UTC · fetched live 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.

[Wilhelm Amberg]

Loescher & Petsch · 1860s

Public domainThe Met

Portrait of Alexander Braun (1805-1877)

Loescher & Petsch · 1876

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Oskar Begas]

Loescher & Petsch · before 1883

Public domainThe Met

Portrait of Robert McClelland (1807-1880)

Loescher & Petsch · 1870

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian

[Unknown Subject]

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

[Karl Heffeck]

Loescher & Petsch · 1860s

Public domainThe Met

[Rildhauer Wolff]

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

[Charles Mandel]

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

[Ludwig Johann Passini]

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

Carl Becker

Loescher & Petsch · 1860s

Public domainThe Met

The Philadelphia Photographer, Vol. I & II, Nos. 1-24

Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown · 1864–65

Public domainThe Met

[Paul Friedrich Meyerheim]

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

Gustav Karl Ludwig Richter

Loescher & Petsch · after 1867

Public domainThe Met

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. 11 matched · 11 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.11 shown
Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2 matched · 2 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.2 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-28 05:01 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.

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.