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. 24 shown for “Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins” — 59 records examined, 4 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 13:32 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)
Edgar Degas · 1865

Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins and bag of first overnight airmail
Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925

View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph
Paul Cézanne · late 1880s

Photograph of airmail pilot Paul Collins
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)
Auguste Renoir · 1878

Photograph of airmail pilot Reuben Wagner
Artist not stated in the record · September 1, 1929

Portrait of a Newhaven Pilot
Hill and Adamson · 1843–1847

Photograph of airmail pilot E. Hamilton Lee
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924

Lions in a Mountainous Landscape
Théodore Géricault · ca. 1818–20

Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner and airplane
Artist not stated in the record · 1918

Boy with a Sword
Edouard Manet · 1861

Photograph of airmail pilots Edison Mouton and Rexford Levisee
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1921

Boating
Edouard Manet · 1874

Photograph of airmail pilot Jack Knight
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924

Gardanne
Paul Cézanne · 1885–86

Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · August 1918
![[Supply Steamers at Nashville, Tennessee], by Rodney Poole](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.metmuseum.org%2FCRDImages%2Fph%2Fweb-large%2FDP274828.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
[Supply Steamers at Nashville, Tennessee]
Rodney Poole · 1862

Photograph of airmail pilot Edward Killgore
Artist not stated in the record · 1918

Irises
Vincent van Gogh · 1890

Photograph of airmail pilot Ira Biffle
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1927

Buzz Aldrin's Footprint on the Surface of the Moon
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) · 1969

Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner
Artist not stated in the record · 1918

Marguerite-Thérèse (Margot) Berard (1874–1956)
Auguste Renoir · 1879

Photograph of airmail pilot Earl F. Ward
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924
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 · 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. 2968603 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-09-01 13:32 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.