Just a few Continental pieces, such an 18th-century French roll-top bureau, survived the cull, as well as a pair of early 19th-century Russian chairs that Randal’s great uncle, antiques dealer Daniel Sykes, left to his grandmother.

The fun, of course, has been tracking down pieces that were original to Glenarm, but some of the finest bits are institutionalized due to a 19th-century inheritance dispute between two McDonnell sisters that forced the family to pay off enormous legal fees. “Annoyingly, they sold the wrong assets,” says Randal dryly, referring to a Christie’s sale in the 1850s that included paintings by Canaletto, Holbein, van Dyck and Stubbs that the fifth Earl of Antrim, “The Collecting Earl,” had assembled a century earlier.

More attainable are pieces such as a 17th-century book of panegyric speeches written to commemorate the exploits of the second Earl of Antrim during the English Civil War that turned up recently in a small auction house in Somerset. “I have friends in the antiques business, specialists who look out for me,” says Randal, “but one can also go to auction Web sites and just put in keywords.”

Randal also looks for paintings that relate to Northern Ireland; he recently purchased an 18th-century watercolor of the Giant’s Causeway, the region’s spectacular 60 million-year-old rock formation, by J. Nixon and a painting of the Glens of Antrim by Andrew Nicholl, a founding member of the Belfast Association of Artists.

One of Randal’s most recent victories was “Boys Dancing on the Seashore,” a 4- by-6-foot seascape by George Romney (1734–1802), one of the artist’s “fancy pictures,” which he secured last summer at Christie’s for $44,444, below the low estimate ($47,169–$75,471). The painting  will join Glenarm’s Romney portrait of a military officer, which hangs in the entrance hall in Glenarm. “We know Romney did the head,” says Randal, “not the shoulders.” Randal has also commissioned paintings of Glenarm’s newly restored walled garden by his uncle, Hector McDonnell, a realist painter recognized as one of the finest Irish figurative artists today.

The works will add to the collection’s 18 equestrian paintings by Thomas Butler, an equestrian painter, commissioned by “The Gambling Earl,” who, Randal says, squandered the family money on bloodstock. Randal found the pictures in the attic and had them cleaned and reframed by his father. The horses depicted match those in the Gambling Earl’s 18thcentury stud book, which was also discovered in Glenarm.

Other treasures include one of 18thcentury painter Francis Wheatley’s most celebrated works, “The Marquess and Marchioness of Antrim,” which Randal says Wheatley tried at one point to buy back. The painting has been loaned to the National Gallery in Dublin. Glenarm also has probably the largest collection of the works of 19th-century naval painter George Chambers outside of the royal household.