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 “The Tree of Life” — 40 records examined, 28 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 05:46 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

The Tree of Life
unknown · n.d.

Adam and Eve
Artist not stated in the record · 1543

Sampler
Artist not stated in the record · 1750–1800

Sidewall
Artist not stated in the record · 19th century

Fragment
Artist not stated in the record · 13th–14th century

The Good Tree or Hieroglyphics of a Christian by E.B. and E.C. Kellogg
Kellogg, E.B. and E.C. · ca 1846

Copp Family Tree
Artist not stated in the record · ca 1795

An Evil Tree or the Natural Heart
unknown · n.d.

The Voyage of Life--Youth
James Smillie, born Edinburgh, Scotland 1807-died Poughkeepsie, NY 1885 · ca. 1853

Photograph of a house surrounded by trees
Artist not stated in the record · 1925

Cherry Blossom Viewing
Ando Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797–1858 · 1797-1858

Negative of a house with fence
Artist not stated in the record · 1925
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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3000478 matched · 40 examined · 28 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 05:46 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.