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 “Old Man with a Staff” — 40 records examined, 18 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-02 16:23 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Old Man with a Staff
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1780–1805

Satirical Print: The Suitor
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1790

The Cornaro Family
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1760–1770

San Jose
Arce group, mid 19th to early 20th centuries · late 19th-early 20th century

Cover
Artist not stated in the record · 1875–1900

Embroidered picture
Artist not stated in the record · 17th century

The Old Man and the Ass, Illustration for Aesop's Fables
Victor Wilbour · ca. 1916

Newspaper clippings about Old Calabar
Artist not stated in the record · 1842-1845

Theatre program for The Old Glory: Benito Cereno
Unidentified · 1964

Portrait of an Old Man with a Beard, with Naked Shoulders
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1760–1770

Old Man's Head
John Chamberlaine, English, 1745 - 1812 · 1796

Old Negro saving few articles after mob violence. Many went destitute + homeless
Unidentified · 1908
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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1918773 matched · 40 examined · 18 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-02 16:23 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.