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. 13 shown for “Theodore Wust” — 41 records examined, 3 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 09:54 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Samuel P. Avery Transporting His Treasures Across the Sea
Theodore Wust · ca. 1875–80

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Theodore Wust, active c. 1860 - c. 1901 · 1871

Samuel Clemens
Theodore Wust, active c. 1860 - c. 1901 · 1874

Artemisia monosperma Delile
Artist not stated in the record · 5 Nov 1878

Fagonia arabica L.
Artist not stated in the record · 1877

Reseda luteola L.
Artist not stated in the record · Jul 1891

Cleome sp.
Artist not stated in the record · 1880

Urtica cannabina L.
Artist not stated in the record · Transcribed d/m/y: /5/88 to /8/88

Hordeum murinum L.
Artist not stated in the record · 10 Jun 1906
Bromus inermis Leyss.
Artist not stated in the record · Transcribed d/m/y: 26/6/96
Bromus madritensis L.
Artist not stated in the record · 12 Apr 1880
Sesleria coerulea (L.) Ard.
Artist not stated in the record · 17 Jun 1952

Centaurea pallescens Del.
Artist not stated in the record · 11 Apr 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. 1 matched · 1 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.1 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 6973 matched · 40 examined · 3 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 2026-09-01 09:54 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.