OpenTwo 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 plane on take off” — 64 records examined, 5 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 15:59 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Boating
Edouard Manet · 1874
Photograph of airmail plane on take off
Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918
The Adoration of the Magi
Joos van Wassenhove · 1472–74
Photograph of airmail plane Curtiss JN-4H
Artist not stated in the record · May 15, 1918
The Crucifixion with Donors and Saints Peter and Margaret of Antioch
Cornelis Engebrechtsz · ca. 1525–30
Photograph of airmail plane at Reno, Nevada
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1920
Portrait of a Carthusian
Petrus Christus · 1446
Photograph of airmail plane at College Park, MD
Artist not stated in the record · August 12, 1918
Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara
Hans Memling · early 1480s
Photograph of airmail planes at Omaha, Nebraska
Artist not stated in the record · 1920
The Harvesters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1565
Photograph of airmail pilot James Hill ready for transcontinental night flight
Artist not stated in the record · July 1, 1925
The Annunciation
Hans Memling · 1480–89
Photograph of airmail planes at Omaha, Nebraska
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1927
The Forest in Winter at Sunset
Théodore Rousseau · ca. 1846–67
Photograph of airmail pilot James DeWitt Hill
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1924
Virgin and Child in a Niche
Jan van Eyck · ca. 1440–50
Photograph of de Havilland airmail plane
Artist not stated in the record · 1996
The Triumph of Fame; (reverse) Impresa of the Medici Family and Arms of the Medici and Tornabuoni Families
Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (called Scheggia) · ca. 1449
Photograph of de Havilland airmail plane and mail truck
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1922
Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement
Fra Filippo Lippi · ca. 1440
Photograph of airmail pilot Lloyd Bertaud and unidentified individual
Artist not stated in the record · September 6, 1927
The Crucifixion
Jan Provoost · ca. 1495
Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner and airplane
Artist not stated in the record · 1918
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. 85 matched · 24 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. 3078111 matched · 40 examined · 1 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 15:59 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.