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. 16 shown for “Toy mailbox bank” — 46 records examined, 29 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-31 23:07 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Merry Company on a Terrace
Jan Steen · ca. 1670

Toy mailbox bank
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1946

Madonna and Child
Filippino Lippi · ca. 1483–84

Toy mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1950-1970

Amusements in Kyoto in the Four Seasons
Maruyama Ōkyo 円山応挙 · late 1770s–early 1780s

Deschler Mailbox Co. RFD Joroleman-style mailbox
Deschler Mailbox Company · 20th Century

Fish in Summer and Autumn
Maruyama Ōkyo · 1785

Street Lamppost Letterbox
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1880

Silver Century Rural Free Delivery mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · 20th Century

Theodore Cole Pulling his Toy Sailboat, Catskill, New York
Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900 · August 1844

Photograph of snorkel chute curbside mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1953

Rural Free Delivery mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · 20th Century

Mailbox remnant from 1906 San Francisco earthquake
Artist not stated in the record · 1905-1972

Swedish mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · mid 20th-early 21st Century

West German mailbox
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1949-1990

Photograph of boy mailing a letter
Artist not stated in the record · c. 1880
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. 6 matched · 6 examined · 2 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.4 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 140353 matched · 40 examined · 27 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 2026-08-31 23:07 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.