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. 24 shown for “Unidentified artists” — 64 records examined, 2 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-30 00:21 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Illustrated manuscript of the Lotus Sutra (Miaofa lianhua jing), Volume 2
Unidentified artist · ca. 1340

Unidentified Man
Unidentified Artist · c. 1870

Grapevine in the Wind
Unidentified artist · 16th century
Alexander Próvost
Unidentified Artist · c. 1850

Portrait of Shun'oku Myōha
Unidentified artist · ca. 1383

John Hunt Morgan
Unidentified Artist · c. 1862

Shakyamuni triad
Unidentified artist · 1565

Unidentified photographer in field
Unidentified Artist · c. 1865

Gathering of government officials
Unidentified artist · ca. 1551

Unidentified photographer in field
Unidentified Artist · c. 1865

Brahma with Attendants and Musicians
Unidentified artist · late 16th century

Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Rooms
Unidentified Artist · c. 1848

Portrait of the Great Master Seosan
Unidentified artist · late 17th–18th century

Unidentified girl
Unidentified Artist · c. 1865

Books and Scholars' Possessions
Unidentified artist · early 20th century

Battle of Bull Run
Unidentified Artist · published August 10, 1861

Grapevine and Squirrels
Unidentified artist · early 19th century

A. A. Turner Carte Holder Box and Advertisement
Unidentified Artist · c. 1860

Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara
Unidentified artist · 14th century

Alfred Waud carte album
Unidentified Artist · c. 1860-70

Emperor Xuanzong's flight to Shu
Unidentified artist · mid-12th century

Marcus Root Daguerreian Token
Unidentified Artist · c. 1850

Amitabha and Kshitigarba
Unidentified artist · first half of the 14th century
Olive Oatman
Unidentified Artist · c. 1856
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. 3292 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. 76735 matched · 40 examined · 0 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 2026-08-30 00:21 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.