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. 15 shown for “Thomas Nast, born Landau, Germany 1840-died Guayaquil, Ecuador 1902” — 27 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 06:09 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Portrait of the Artist
Thomas Nast · ca. 1884

A Viking
Thomas Nast, born Landau, Germany 1840-died Guayaquil, Ecuador 1902

Portrait of a Child (Cyril Nast?)
Thomas Nast · ca. 1881

The Rebel Army Crossing the Fords of the Potomac for the Invasion of Maryland, from Harper's Weekly, September 27, 1862
Thomas Nast, born Landau, Germany 1840-died Guayaquil, Ecuador 1902 · 1862

Portrait of a Child (Cyril Nast?)
Thomas Nast · ca. 1881

Thomas Nast
John White Alexander, 7 Oct 1856 - 31 May 1915 · 1887

Portrait of a Child (Cyril Nast?)
Thomas Nast · ca. 1881

Bust-length Portrait of Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast · ca. 1888

Portrait of Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast · 1870–80

A Stocking Full (published in "Harper's Weekly," January 4, 1879)
Thomas Nast · originally published 1879

Reproduction of a photograph of Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast · after 1896

Santa Claus and Little Bo Peep (published in "Harper's Young People," December 23, 1879)
Thomas Nast · originally published 1879

Christmas Eve (published "Harper's Weekly," January 3, 1863)
Thomas Nast · originally published 1863

Santa Claus in Camp (published in "Harper's Weekly," January 3, 1863)
Thomas Nast · originally published 1863

The Slave of Fashion (published in "Harper's Bazar," April 20, 1878)
Thomas Nast · originally published 1878
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. 39 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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.3 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-04 06:09 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.