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 “Print of Cab Calloway and his band performing on stage” — 64 records examined, 24 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-03 05:04 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Young Man and Woman in an Inn
Frans Hals · 1623

Print of Cab Calloway and his band performing on stage
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

Grand Piano
Bartolomeo Cristofori · 1720

Print of Cab Calloway conducting his band with a large audience visible
Artist not stated in the record · 1940s - 1960s

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage
Edgar Degas · ca. 1874

Print of Cab Calloway dancing at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s

The Harvesters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · 1565

Print of Cab Calloway conducting his band
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

Virgin and Child
Hans Memling · Early sixteenth century

Photographic print of Cab Calloway and his band in a sleeper car
Artist not stated in the record · 1933

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
Georges Seurat · 1887–88

Print of Cab Calloway in checked suit standing in front of microphone
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

Hermann von Wedigh III (died 1560)
Hans Holbein the Younger · 1532

Print of Cab Calloway with his band and dancers from the movie The Singing Kid
Artist not stated in the record · 1936; printed 1970s

Elizabeth Farren (born about 1759, died 1829), Later Countess of Derby
Sir Thomas Lawrence · 1790

Print of Cab Calloway and dancers performing
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s

The Dormition of the Virgin; (reverse) Christ Carrying the Cross
Hans Schäufelein · ca. 1510

Print of Cab Calloway looking out a window
Artist not stated in the record · 1930s - 1960s

Marcantonio Pasqualini (1614–1691) Crowned by Apollo
Andrea Sacchi · 1641

Poster for Ebony Parade
Artist not stated in the record · 1947

A Book Peddler
Master of the Canesso Peddler · ca. 1670–90

Print of Cab Calloway dancing at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba
Artist not stated in the record · 1950s

The Fortune-Teller
Georges de La Tour · probably 1630s

Program from the Cotton Club
Artist not stated in the record · 1938
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. 122 matched · 24 examined · 0 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. 3561458 matched · 40 examined · 24 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 2026-09-03 05:04 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.