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 “Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉” — 19 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 09:14 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.

Letter to Yamagishi Hanzan
Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 · dated 1685 (Jōkyō 2)

Hokku poem “On a withered branch”
Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 · probably 1680s

“The names of things” haiku
Matsuo Bashō

Poetry Painting
Matsuo Bashō · 17th century

Record of a haiku exchange on kaishi writing paper
Matsuo Bashō · second half of the 17th century

Hokku Poem “With a Powder Brush,” from The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō · ca. 1689

Chrysanthemums and Hokku Poem “With the Passing of Autumn”
Matsuo Bashō · 1688–94

Portrait of the Poet Matsuo Bashō (?)
Katsushika Hokusai · 18th–19th century

Ichikawa Danjūrō VII (1791–1859) in the Role of Konoshita Tokichi from the Scene "Mountain Gate" in the Play Yakko Yakko Edo Hanayari
Utagawa Kunisada · 1819

Courtesan Viewing a Painting of Fukurokuju
Isoda Koryūsai · ca. 1768

Warbler on a Plum Branch
Utagawa Hiroshige · ca. 1835

Swallows and Budding Wild Cherry
Utagawa Hiroshige · ca. 1835
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. 19 matched · 19 examined · 1 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 09:14 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.