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. 19 shown for “Sash or towel” — 64 records examined, 41 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-30 05:50 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Sash
Leo Madjarski · 1767–80

Sash or towel
Artist not stated in the record · late 19th century

Towel or drying rack
United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (“Shakers”) · ca. 1830

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · late 19th century

Sash
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

The Musicians
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) · 1597

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century (?)

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 18th century

Towel edge
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Towel
Artist not stated in the record · 16th century

Linen Towel With Reticella Insertion and Bobbin Lace Edging
Artist not stated in the record

Sash
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1800
Sash
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1628–58

Sash
Artist not stated in the record · 10th–15th century

Woman with a Towel
Edgar Degas · 1894 or 1898

Standing Shiva or Temple Guardian (Dvarapala)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. first half of the 10th century
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. 217 matched · 24 examined · 8 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. 243186 matched · 40 examined · 33 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.7 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-30 05:50 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.