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 “Title Page, from "Oriental Scenery: Twenty Four Views in Hindoostan"” — 24 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-28 10:30 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.

Title page, from "Vari Capricci"
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo · 1785

Title Page, from Benevolent Epistle
Thomas Rowlandson · 1790

Title Page, from "Newes Lauberbuechlein"
Peter Aubry II · 1628–66

Title page, from "Sketches from Nature"
Thomas Rowlandson · 1822

Title Page, from "New Book of Children"
Pierre Alexandre Aveline · 1720–60

Title Page, from "Carceri d'invenzione" (Imaginary Prisons)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · ca. 1749–50

Title page, from "The Seven Sacraments"
Lorenzo Zucchi · 1767

Title Page, from Grotisch fur alle Kunstler
Theodor de Bry · 1580–1600

Title Page, from Two Genii with Animals
Nicolaes de Bruyn · 1594

Title page, from "The Vicar of Wakefield"
Thomas Rowlandson · 1817

Title Page, from "Barberinae aulae fornix"
Anonymous, Italian, 17th century · ca. 1677

Title Page, from Des Pendants de Cleffs pour les Femmes
Johann Theodor de Bry · 1580–1600
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. 2344 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 2026-08-28 10:30 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.