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 “Oxford Paper Company” — 24 records examined, 7 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 00:18 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.

Pair of Four-Barreled Turnover Percussion Pistols of Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 4th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne (1785–1851), with Pair of Box-Lock Turn-Off Pocket Pistols, Case, and Accessories
James Purdey the Elder · 1831

Gold-inlaid Colt Model 1851 Navy Revolver (serial no. 20133), with Case and Accessories
Samuel Colt · ca. 1853

Processional Cross
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1150–75

Great Indian Fruit Bat
Bhawani Das · ca. 1777–82

Bible
Artist not stated in the record · 1477 (printing); 1478 (binding)

Salisbury Plain with Old Sarum in the distance, Wiltshire
William Turner of Oxford · 1835–45

Footed goblet with bulging bowl
Philip Webb · 1860

Oxford High Street
William Henry Fox Talbot · ca. 1845

Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume
Peter Paul Rubens · 1617

Aman-Jean (Portrait of Edmond François Aman-Jean)
Georges Seurat · 1882–83

Portrait of Alain de Coëtivy (1407–1474)
Jean Fouquet · ca. 1451–55

Daoist Master Fei Zhangfang
Sesson Shūkei · ca. 1555–61
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. 5631 matched · 24 examined · 7 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 2026-09-04 00:18 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.