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. 9 shown for “William Newzam Prior Nicholson, 5 Feb 1872 - 16 May 1949” — 40 records examined, 31 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-03 02:36 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 Clemens
William Newzam Prior Nicholson, 5 Feb 1872 - 16 May 1949 · 1902

Samuel Clemens
William Newzam Prior Nicholson, 5 Feb 1872 - 16 May 1949 · 1900

William Newzam Prior Nicholson
Alvin Langdon Coburn, 11 Jun 1882 - 23 Nov 1966 · February 3, 1908

J. A. M. Whistler
Unidentified Artist · after 1898

Gustav Cramer and George William Harris
Harris & Ewing Studio, active 1905 - 1977 · c. 1908

Conrad Nicholson Hilton
Pach Brothers Studio, active 1867 - 1993 · c. 1949

William Miller
Unidentified Artist · c. 1840-50

Joseph Hopper Nicholson
Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, 12 Mar 1770 - 23 Jun 1852 · 1806

William Stimpson
Unidentified Artist · 1860
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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 2314670 matched · 40 examined · 31 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.9 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-03 02:36 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.