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. 13 shown for “Samuel Ringgold” — 43 records examined, 20 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 14:19 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Flask
Baltimore Glass Works · ca. 1846

Samuel Ringgold
Unidentified Artist · c. 1855

Samuel Ringgold
John Plumbe, Jr., 13 Jul 1809 - 28 May 1857 · 1846

Samuel Ringgold
John Vanderlyn, 15 Oct 1775 - 23 Sep 1852 · c. 1825

Samuel Ringgold
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1845

The National Plumbeotype Gallery - Samuel Ringgold
John Plumbe, Jr., 13 Jul 1809 - 28 May 1857 · 1847

Samuel Ringgold
Nathaniel Currier, 27 Mar 1813 - 20 Nov 1888 · 1846

Samuel Ringgold
Nathaniel Currier, 27 Mar 1813 - 20 Nov 1888 · 1846

Samuel Ringgold
Nathaniel Currier, 27 Mar 1813 - 20 Nov 1888 · 1846

Palo Alto, Death of Major Ringgold
John C. McRae, active 1850 - 1880 · c. 1846

Death of Major Ringgold at the Battle of Palo Alto
Thomas Phillibrowne, active c. 1835 - 1860 · c. 1846

Major Ringgold, Mortally Wounded
Edward Williams Clay, 19 Apr 1799 - 31 Dec 1857 · 1846

The Death of the Gallant Major Ringgold
Sarony & Major Lithography Company, active 1846 - 1857 · 1846
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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 2 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.1 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 25063 matched · 40 examined · 18 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 2026-08-27 14:19 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.