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. 12 shown for “Shadow Clock” — 62 records examined, 47 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-02 21:24 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Shadow Clock
Artist not stated in the record · 305–30 BCE

Falcon-headed sphinx recumbent on a pedestal with a ramp, and a feline(?) behind, possibly a gnomon for a shadow clock or instrument
Artist not stated in the record · 664–30 BCE

Clock watch with astronomical dial and sundial
Jan Jansen Bockeltz · ca. 1605–10

Der Hundefreund (The Dog's Friend)
Moritz von Schwind · mid-19th century

Portable horizontal sundial
Jacques Lucas · probably before 1681

Pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini, 1675–1758)
Pierre Hubert Subleyras · 1746

Piazza San Marco
Francesco Guardi · late 1760s

Portrait of a Woman in a Rose Dress
French Painter

Portrait of a Man in a Brown Coat
French Painter

Head of a Bearded Elder
Augustin Pajou · 1768

Portrait of a Man
Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Bonvicino) · ca. 1520–25

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
Georges Seurat · 1887–88
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. 22 matched · 22 examined · 7 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. 3373 matched · 40 examined · 40 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.0 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-02 21:24 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.