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 “Shield of Sir John Smythe (1534–1607)” — 24 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 04:08 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.

Shield of Sir John Smythe (1534–1607)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1575–85

Shield
Girolamo da Treviso · ca. 1535

Mrs. Lewis Thomas Watson (Mary Elizabeth Milles, 1767–1818)
Sir Joshua Reynolds · 1789

Rubens, Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678)
Peter Paul Rubens · ca. 1635

Saints Michael and Francis
Juan de Flandes · ca. 1505–9

The Abduction of the Sabine Women
Nicolas Poussin · probably 1633–34

Good Words for 1862
Norman Macleod · 1862

A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt
Peter Paul Rubens · ca. 1635

Saints Peter, Martha, Mary Magdalen, and Leonard
Correggio (Antonio Allegri) · ca. 1515

The Abduction of Cassandra by Ajax from a set of The Horses
Frans Cleyn · designed early 1630s, woven ca. 1650–70

The Nativity Polyptych
Rogier van der Weyden · ca. 1450–60

Flagon (one of a pair)
Artist not stated in the record · 1597–98
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. 36 matched · 24 examined · 0 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 2026-08-27 04:08 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.