Floridians have always had a healthy appetite for fine porcelain, which explains its appearance at the 10-day, 90-dealer art and antiques fair that opens on Friday in West Palm Beach.

“After 9/11 Americans stopped coming to London, and America is where our best customers are,” said Michael Cohen, a British dealer who specializes in Chinese export porcelain. “So we’re doing fairs, which is where we find new clients.”

He sells works from the 17th and 18th centuries, including armorial, blue and white, famille verte, famille rose and Chinese Imari. At the fair he has eight pairs of Chinese court ladies made during the Qing dynasty.

The most colorful was made under the Qianlong Emperor, about 1740. The women have nodding heads, which are separate but attached so they can move up and down. Both have finely modeled, happy faces, wear elaborate hairdos and turquoise coats over red gowns.

“Normally the robes are white with decorations on top,” Mr. Cohen said. “To have the robes a solid color is always a sign of good quality.”

He also has a small famille verte cat from about 1670, made to be a night light. With a lighted candle inside, the cat’s mouth and eyes glow.

“It’s thought to frighten rats and mice — and demons,” Mr. Cohen said. “Cat lights are rare, and this coloration makes it even rarer.”

The market for Chinese export is not huge, but Mr. Cohen said it is strong at the top. He made news in 2005 when he bought a pair of leopards made in the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722) for $4.1 million at Christie’s. He later sold them. “At the low end, it’s going through a low ebb,” he said. He is asking $225,000 for his turquoise ladies, $32,000 for the cat light.

L. Codosero, Galeria Arte Antiguo, from Madrid, is one of seven Spanish dealers at the fair. It has a Hispano-Moresque lusterware dish made before 1623 that depicts a soldier in hues of bright blue and orange. The Moors introduced tin-glazed earthenware to Spain in the 13th century, and it is still prized for its iridescent surface.

A New York gallery selling British pottery and porcelain, Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge, has a 31-inch-tall Meissen pelican in glazed white porcelain. It was made in the early 20th century by Erich Oehme, who modeled it after a 1732 original by John Joachim K?ndler, Meissen’s greatest sculptor. Every feather is articulated.

“It’s an extraordinary object,” said Paul Vandekar, a principal of the gallery. “Only a few were made because it took years for the clay to dry.”

He is asking $175,000 for it. “The last model sold, which was from the 18th century, went for $7 million,” he said.

Sylvia Powell, a London pottery dealer, has a William De Morgan six-tile panel of a wide-eyed owl perched above a crescent moon. De Morgan, a late-19th-century English artist and pottery designer, was known for his stylized birds and animals in what are often called Persian colors (green, blue, lavender).

“As far as we know, there were only four owl panels made, and this is the only perfect one that remains,” said Ms. Powell, who is asking $40,000 for it.

New Tools of the Trade

Beginning in 2001, after paying unannounced visits to hundreds of up-market antiques dealers, Michael Bruno invited about 400 of them (380 American, the rest, British and French) to display their inventories on his Web site, 1stdibs.com. (He said 800 others were on a waiting list.)

“We amalgamated all the dealers’ inventories into one search site, which can be navigated by item, city, category, period or creator,” Mr. Bruno said. “Dealers like the site to show off their best merchandise — and to see what the other dealers are posting.”

Each dealer pays a monthly subscription fee (between $500 and $2,000, depending on how many items are to be listed). The average number for each dealer is about 450.

At any one time there are about 50,000 objects on the site, and turnover is strong. It is updated every Wednesday morning, when about 1,000 new pieces are added. Every month about 3,000 antiques are sold.

“Buyers and sellers look at it to see what’s hot and what’s not,” Mr. Bruno said. “We show which items are the most viewed.”

Both individual shoppers and interior designers use the site. Buyers have the option of purchasing directly from the dealer or using 1stdibs’s full service, in which the company negotiates the price, arranges shipping and the payment, for a 20 percent buyer’s premium.

“Our goal is to bring the marketplace online without interference at any hour of the day,” Mr. Bruno said. “We also get people who aren’t normally exposed to certain antiques to look at them by posting, in the new listings, 18th-century antiques next to 20th-century” examples.

He said the total number of visits to his site in 2007 was 7.3 million. (That does not include the number of page views per visit, which could be several.) Furniture and decorative arts of the 20th century continue to be strong.

Last year 1stdibs listed 71,355 items, of which 52,393 were from about 1900 or later. Of the grand total about half, or 35,526, sold, and of those, 27,164 were from about 1900 and later.

Total sales were $218 million, of which $150 million was for items from 1900 and later — healthy business, at a time when walk-in visits to antiques shows are on the wane.