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 “postcard sent from FPO 148 on album page” — 43 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 00:57 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
L'Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Marie Julien, 1848–1911)
Vincent van Gogh · 1888–89

postcard sent from FPO 148 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · 1942

"Four Portraits: (upper left) A Raja (Perhaps Raja Sarang Rao), by Balchand; (upper right) 'Inayat Khan, by Daulat; (lower left) 'Abd al-Khaliq, probably by Balchand; (lower right) Jamal Khan Qaravul, by Murad", Folio from the Shah Jahan Album
Balachand · recto: ca. 1610–15; verso: dated 1541

cover sent from FPO 148 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · October 1, 1944

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)
Auguste Renoir · 1878

Passed by Censor cover sent with FPO 148 marking on album page
Artist not stated in the record · February 24, 1942

album page with examples of FPO 148 Sarafand marking on album page
Artist not stated in the record · 1942-1943

On His Majesty's Service cover sent from FPO 122 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · March 27, 1941

cover sent from FPO 67 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · July 5, 1941

Active Service form cover sent from FPO 154 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · February 26, 1942

On His Majesty's Service cover sent from FPO 164 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · February 21, 1941

On His Majesty's Service cover sent from FPO 164 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · March 24, 1941

On His Majesty's Service cover sent from FPO 26 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · December 16, 1936

On Active Service cover sent from FPO 122 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · July 9, 1940

On Active Service cover sent from FPO 120 on album page
Artist not stated in the record · October 27, 1941
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. 3 matched · 3 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.3 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1261833 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 2026-09-01 00:57 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.