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. 20 shown for “Sanford Robinson Gifford” — 53 records examined, 33 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 14:04 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore
Sanford Robinson Gifford · 1871

From the Shawangunk Mountains
Sanford Robinson Gifford, born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880 · 1823-1880

Tivoli
Sanford Robinson Gifford · 1870

Villa Malta, Rome
Sanford Robinson Gifford, born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880 · 1879

A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove)
Sanford Robinson Gifford · 1862

Indians at Campfire--Moon Rising
Sanford Robinson Gifford, born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880 · n.d.

Sanford R. Gifford
Launt Thompson · 1871

Near Ariccia, Italy
Sanford Robinson Gifford, born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880 · 1868

Sanford Robinson Gifford
Eastman Johnson · 1880

Whiteface Mountain from Lake Placid
Sanford Robinson Gifford, born Greenfield, NY 1823-died New York City 1880 · 1866

Self-portrait
Sanford Robinson Gifford · 1853

Hudson Iron Works, Hudson, New York
Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900 · 1844–45
![[Sanford Robinson Gifford], by Unknown](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.metmuseum.org%2FCRDImages%2Fph%2Fweb-large%2FDP-386-101.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
[Sanford Robinson Gifford]
Unknown · 1860s

Rhizogonium spiniforme (Hedw.) Bruch
Artist not stated in the record · 19 Jul 1953

The Brook in the Woods
Worthington Whittredge · ca. 1885–86

Gifford Pinchot
Pirie MacDonald, 27 Jan 1867 - 22 Apr 1942 · 1909

Pompton Plains, New Jersey
Jasper Francis Cropsey · 1867

Sunset Sky
John Frederick Kensett · 1872

A Woman Playing the Theorbo-Lute and a Cavalier
Gerard ter Borch the Younger · ca. 1658

A Maid Asleep
Johannes Vermeer · ca. 1656–57
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. 13 matched · 13 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. 15857 matched · 40 examined · 32 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.8 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-04 14:04 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.