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. 9 shown for “Stanley Clarke Signature Standard 4 String Bass” — 43 records examined, 34 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-05 01:08 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Archlute
David Tecchler · ca. 1725

Stanley Clarke Signature Standard 4 String Bass
Artist not stated in the record · after 1990

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
Georges Seurat · 1887–88

Upright acoustic double bass owned by Stanley Clarke
Artist not stated in the record · late 20th century

Wheat Field with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Instrument case owned by Stanely Clarke
Artist not stated in the record · late 20th century

Bootsy Collins Space Bass guitar owned by Bootsy Collins
Artist not stated in the record · July 2002

Bass guitar used by Robert "Kool" Bell of Kool & the Gang
Artist not stated in the record · 1976-1978

Standard American Black Bass and Lake Flies
Endicott and Company · 1882
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 · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.3 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 736341 matched · 40 examined · 34 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.6 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-05 01:08 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.