Christie’s sale of English furniture on Monday in New York includes some 18th-century Irish antiques, each carefully notated in the catalog with a typically Irish winged-harp symbol. The harp is helpful, because it can be difficult to identify 18th-century Irish antiques.

Even experts become confused, but help is on the way. Yale University Press has just published “Irish Furniture,” by Desmond FitzGerald, an expert in Irish antiques, and James Peill, a furniture specialist at Christie’s New York. The book has been in the works for more than 40 years.

“In the 1960s, when I was a curator at the Victoria and Albert, there was practically no Irish furniture there,” Mr. FitzGerald said. “It was not regarded as having any importance, but I started buying it for myself.”

Mr. FitzGerald, the final holder of the hereditary Knight of Glin title, returned to his native Ireland to work as a representative for Christie’s in the 1970s. “I was like a funeral director at many important Irish sales,” he said. “In those days Ireland’s grand houses were being dismantled.” Now, he said, thanks to the Celtic Tiger (as Ireland’s economic boom of the ’90s is known), “the tide has turned, and the houses are being bought back and refurbished.”

Fascinated by Irish decorative arts, he collected more than 2,000 photos of Irish antiques, divided by furniture type. “In time, we were able to identify schools of carvers in Dublin and what houses commissioned what pieces,” he said. He began writing a book.

“He started working on it before I was born,” said Mr. Peill, 35, who met Mr. FitzGerald when he joined Christie’s in 1994.

While it is always dangerous to generalize, Irish furniture tends to be gutsy, bold and distinctive.

“There is an ebullience in Irish decorative arts — the plasterwork, the silver, the bookbinding and furniture,” Mr. FitzGerald said. “Perhaps the result of a provincial feeling of superseding the mother country, England.”

Humphrey Wakefield, a collector and former director of Mallett, the English antiques shop in London, appreciates “the exuberance” of Irish furniture. “You get English, French, Dutch input, and the Irish spirit picks up that input and swirls it into its own cocktail,” he said. “Then there are the technical details and stylistic things that tell you something is Irish.”

Most obvious are the motifs, whether human, animal, mythological or floral, that enliven Irish furniture. Imposing, deeply carved, over-scaled lions’ heads and eagles, goblins, snakes, scallop shells and baskets of flowers abound.

“The whole atmosphere in Ireland is gentle, misty and depressive,” Mr. Wakefield said. “Therefore they have to have furniture that almost explodes. Then it’s wonderful and worth having.”

The lion masks are particularly ferocious. “The furniture has an animalistic nature,” Mr. Peill said. “It tends to be slightly cruder than its more refined English counterparts, but you do get an amazing display of carving.”

Carved foliage tends to be tamer. It is often seen on the apron of a table in low relief against a background incised with tiny dots. “This trellis etching on the background, known as diapering, is a particularly Irish feature,” Mr. Peill said. “So is flatness of carving.”

Lot 120, a George III mahogany side table from about 1760, is probably the most typically Irish piece in the Christie’s sale. (The presale view continues through Sunday.) It has a plain frieze below its rectangular mahogany top. Below it is a carved apron bursting with scallop shells, flowers and acanthus leaves. The knees of the cabriole legs have flowing acanthus leaves, and the feet are squared and pawed. The estimate is $50,000 to $80,000.

Desmond Guinness, the founder of the Irish Georgian Society and author of several books on Irish houses, said that only in Ireland do you find the squared-off hairy-paw foot. “A bulging hock above the foot is another Irish characteristic,” he added. Other clues? Carved tassels on chair backs, elongated shells, chair arms terminating in eagles’ heads and oak-leaf festoons.

Buzzy O’Keeffe, the owner of the Water Club and the River Café in New York, has collected Irish antiques for 25 years, including furniture, mirrors and silver. He shops at Manhattan galleries that specialize in American antiques, like O’Sullivan Antiques and Ann Morris, and attends auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Doyle New York. He said he does not shop much in Dublin anymore.

“These days Irish antiques are more expensive in Ireland than they are in the United States,” he said. “Of course, I made things hard for myself by collecting only Irish Georgian.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, Irish dealers sent shiploads of Irish furniture to America, when times were hard in Ireland.

Chantal O’Sullivan, a dealer with Irish antiques shops in New York and Dublin, said she has a few Irish tables for sale in New York. “The tables I used to sell in America are going back to Ireland, where the market is very strong now,” she said. “Irish furniture is more in demand than English furniture because it’s rarer, so the prices are becoming stronger.”

The market for Irish furniture has changed a lot in the last decade.

“Irish furniture used to be regarded as ugly in Ireland,” Mr. Wakefield said. “And even when Irish furniture went to America, it was never as expensive as American antiques. Until recently you could add two zeroes to the price of an 18th-century American piece that looked just like an Irish one.”

Clever shoppers may be able to locate Irish antiques at the five-day Spring 2007 International Art & Antiques Show, opening today at the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street. The vigilant should also be on the lookout for American antiques made by the many Irish craftsmen who immigrated to Philadelphia, Boston and Charleston, S.C., in the 17th and 18th centuries.

There was also a lot of Irish influence on the Colonial cabinetmakers of the Rappahannock River Basin in Virginia. One scholar, Ronald L. Hurst, wrote in the 1997 Chipstone publication, American Furniture, that some of these cabinetmakers must have been either of Irish origin or had seen Irish furniture because their furniture carries so many distinctive Irish traits.

Ralph Harvard, a New York architect and interior designer, is an expert on Southern furniture. Asked his opinion of Rappahannock River Basin Irish antiques, he said, “They may not be beautiful, but they are definitely ambitious.”

Information from: www.nytimes.com

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