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 “Sword Guard (Tsuba) With Elephant Motif (象図鐔)” — 24 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-30 11:47 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.

Sword Guard (Tsuba) With Elephant Motif (象図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1615–1868

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Peony Motif (牡丹図鐔)
Takehara Tomomasa · late 18th–early 19th century

Sword Guard (Tsuba) with Lily Motif (百合図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · mid-19th century

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Cherry Blossom Motif (桜図与四郎象嵌鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · 17th century

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Cherry Blossom Motif (桜図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Flower Basket Motif (花籠透鐔)
石黒政明 Ishiguro Masaaki · first half 19th century

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Flower Basket Motif (花籠透鐔)
萩谷勝平 Hagiya Katsuhira · 1860

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Cherry Blossom Motif (桜図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · mid-18th century

Sword guard (Tsuba) With Chrysanthemum Motif (菊花図鐔)
Masayoshi · late 18th century
.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
Sword Guard (Tsuba) With Pine Motif (松図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1615–1868

Sword guard (Tsuba) with Flower Basket Motif (花籠図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1615–1868

Sword guard (Tsuba) with Flower Basket Motif (花籠図鐔)
Artist not stated in the record · late 18th–early 19th 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. 41 matched · 24 examined · 2 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 2026-08-30 11:47 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.