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. 11 shown for “Samuel Cousins” — 24 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 03:59 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.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.

William Shakespeare
Samuel Cousins · 1849

Nature (The Calmady Children)
Samuel Cousins · 1835

Candlestick
Samuel Siervent · 1762–63

Mrs. Samuel Mifflin and Her Granddaughter Rebecca Mifflin Francis
Charles Willson Peale · 1777–80

Samuel Gardiner
William Johnston · 1763

Samuel Mifflin
Charles Willson Peale · 1777–80

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1)
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer · November , 1857

Mrs. Samuel Gardiner
William Johnston · 1763

Basket
Myer Myers · 1770–76

Joan of Arc
Jules Bastien-Lepage · 1879
![[Samuel Cousins], by John and Charles Watkins](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.metmuseum.org%2FCRDImages%2Fph%2Fweb-large%2FDP-386-043.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
[Samuel Cousins]
John and Charles Watkins · 1860s
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. 48 matched · 24 examined · 1 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 2026-08-28 03:59 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.