Pluck of the Irish

The Duke of Abercorn is fussing with plate racks, wrestling them out of their shrink-wrap as he arranges a collection of Mottahedeh plates on a sideboard in Belle Isle Castle's gallery. "Mildred Mottahedeh was a personal friend and frequent guest in our home," he says. He stands back to survey his work, then points to the porcelain's leafy patterns. "Adapted from Sir Hans Sloane's work," he notes with satisfaction, referring to the 18th-century botanical collector from Northern Ireland's County Down.

Moments later the duke, all long limbs and tweed, dashes off, taking the stairs in pairs - he just remembered an engraving stuffed in a bedroom closet that will look extraordinary in the entrance hall.

It's hard to believe that the 67-year-old Duke of Abercorn, who officially owns more than 2,000 works of art, had barely bought as much as a print until 1991, when he purchased a decaying 17th-century castle and 470 acres of lush County Fermanagh lakelands as a future home for his then 12-year-old youngest son. That wasn't because the duke lacked interest in art and antiques - quite the contrary. But raised, and now dwelling in his ancestral seat, Barons Court, one of Ireland's grandest homes chock-a-block with museum-quality treasures, the duke had little incentive to buy.

"Barons Court was in situ," he says of his wooded County Tyrone estate. Full of Sir Joshua Reynolds portraits, Diego Velazquez and Sir Edwin Landseer oils, and some of the finest plasterwork in Western Europe, Barons Court didn't need an acquisitive owner. Belle Isle, however, did.

"This was the coldest, gloomiest room in Ireland," says the duke, standing in what is now Belle Isle's showpiece - a blooming azalea gallery punctuated with French blackamoors and Scottish, English and Irish hunting and landscape paintings.

A lifetime of involvement in Ulster affairs and years as a representative to the House of Commons had given the duke an intimate knowledge of the northern counties. When the sole surviving owner of Belle Isle, an elderly woman who had taken up full-time residence in front of the hearth, was ready to sell her unheated family castle, the duke jumped. Knowing that the property dated back to the 11th century and had once housed one of the compilers of 'The Annals of Ulster', a kind of northern 'Book of Kells', the duke spotted the makings of an historic treasure.

Realizing that only a visionary could see potential in soot-seared walls, the duke and duchess called in their friend, the late interior designer David Hicks, whose client book included Prince Charles and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. As young parents in the 1970s, the couple had hired Hicks to update Barons Court. Hicks transformed an imposing monument into a livable family home with his now-trademark jolting color strokes and reinterpretations of space. "The floor plans and a large glass of port were all that David needed. He worked very quickly," the duke says.

Twenty years later, the duke and duchess refilled Hicks' glass when they asked him to return to Ireland and work his magic. He arrived with one of his outrageous palettes of persimmon, chartreuse and marigold. The duke, in the meantime, broke out the auction catalogs and started shopping.

This was my first purchase," he says, pointing to "The Otter Hunt," 1844, a sizable, stunning Sir Edwin Landseer oil. "I bought it for £7,000 [$9,962]." Considering that "Refreshment," a composition not even half this size, sold at Sotheby's New York last June for $247,750, the duke was off to a promising start. "I just try to buy what appeals to me," he says, "not always for investment purposes." The result at Belle Isle is a highly personal collection with endless six-degrees-of-separation to the Abercorns' family and friends.

It's no surprise that the duke's first buy was a Landseer. The Victorian painter, nicknamed "Lanny" by the duke's great-great-grandfather, used to spend weeks at a time at Barons Court, socializing and painting Abercorn family portraits. Landseer's works are sprinkled throughout Belle Isle, including in The Landseer Bedroom where the duke hangs original engravings with prints.

Mixing high and low is one of the duke's favorite design tricks. An important piece of Irish furniture, a partner's desk that once belonged to the Dunraven family in Adare Castle, has rocketed in value since the duke bought it 10 years ago from Christie's for £3,000 (approximately $4,249). It now sits in the drawing room with rattan sofas that the duke sent sailing in a container from the Philippines and $4 pillows that the duchess spotted in a market in Istanbul. He's not above having Irish Chippendale beds copied in New Delhi, India, as well as Irish peat buckets ("I'm mad about them!"), which he confesses are among his favorite objets in the house. "I know that I'm not always aesthetically right - look at all the very different generations of furniture here - but there's a lot that cheers you up," he says.

The duke's self-confident risk-taking has paid off. When he heard that a collection of James Lamb's furniture was available in England, he bought the whole lot, filling Belle Isle bedrooms with the Manchester craftsman's thoughtfully carved gentleman's wardrobes of Hungarian ash and the dining room with sideboards, a table and 14 chairs. Described by Robin Emmerson,curator at the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside in England, as "the most aesthetically advanced cabinetmaker outside London in the 19th century," Lamb's pieces worked perfectly with the duke's art collection, which draws heavily on that period. He counts the purchase among his best, a sentiment he doesn't share for a couple of ancestral portraits from the School of Lely that he bought "at 3 a.m. after a dose of Wild Turkey. I paid too much for them," he says with a laugh. "And I've been on a learning curve ever since."

But works by Paul Henry, Percy French, Albert Hartland, George Russell (who was known as A.E. and was a great friend of William Yeats) and Derek Hill (another late friend of the Abercorns) in the Belle Isle collection help balance out any of the duke's mistakes. "There's a huge appreciation for Irish paintings now, particularly among Irish collectors," says James O'Halloran, managing director of James Adam Salerooms in Dublin. The duke hangs these watercolors and oils adjacent to contemporary Russian paintings that he and the duchess (who is a desccendant of the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin) picked up on a 1993 trip to St. Petersburg. The couple purchased directly from the artists after "walking up 16 flights of stone stairs and consuming a lot of diabolic Russian champagne," the duke recalls.

Clearly the duke has caught the collecting bug, and as he moves furniture around Belle Isle, he seems pleased that the flaming Virginia creeper-covered stone castle is still a work-in-progress. After recently finding, in a country house in Scotland, a massive silver center-piece with the Abercorn crest that had been sold at the turn of the century, the duke is back on the scent of the hunt.

The fireplace is roaring again at Belle Isle, and not because the Abercorns' son, Lord Nicholas, has moved in. After years of renovations and redecorating, the duke and duchess have decided to rent out the estate to discriminating travelers. Outdoors enthusiasts can shoot woodcock, snipe and duck in the Irish country-side and fish for pike, perch and bream in the waters of Upper Lough Erne, while art and antiques buffs can sip their sherry in the midst of a very personal, 920-piece, aristocratic collection.

'Art & Antiques', April 2002, by Sallie Brady

Belle Isle Estate
Lisbellaw, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, BT94 5HG
Telephone +44 (0)28 6638 7231 Facsimile +44 (0)28 6638 7261
Email accommodation@belleislecastle.com