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. 7 shown for “Portrait of John Knox (1505-1572)” — 18 records examined, 11 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-05 09:29 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.

Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670)
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) · 1650

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)
Paul Gauguin · 1891

Striding Man
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2100–1950 B.C.

Portrait of a cleric
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

The Departure of the Gondola
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo · mid-1760s

The Inauguration of Washington as First President of the United States, April 30th 1789 – At the Old City Hall, New York – The oath of office was administered by Chancellor Livingston of the State of New York – Mr. Otis the Secretary of the Senate holding up the Bible on a crimson cushion
Currier & Ives · 1876

The Natchez
Eugène Delacroix · 1823–24 and 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. 18 matched · 18 examined · 11 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.7 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 2026-09-05 09:29 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.