It’s Old Masters season in New York, and antiques are coming along for the ride. Collectors snatched up period drawings and paintings at a series of auctions this week. At Sotheby’s Old Master paintings sale yesterday, the tally was $96,902,400; Rembrandt’s “Saint James the Greater” sold for $25.8 million, making it the second highest price ever paid for a work by the Dutch master. Christie’s sold $7,884,040 in Old Master drawings yesterday.

The rising tide of the art market is spurring sales of complementary antique furnishings. Meanwhile, collectors buying at the Winter Antiques Show, being held until Sunday at Park Avenue’s Seventh Regiment Armory, have also been strong.

“Once collectors have their drawings, they want to upgrade their furniture,” Helen Fioratti, who presides over L’Antiquaire & the Connoisseur gallery on Madison Avenue, said. She is participating in Master Drawings New York, a series of exhibitions by 16 specialist dealers that will be on view through this week.

Ms. Fioratti’s gallery is among several participating that also showcase antiques. She said her client roster is now swelling with clients adding antiques to their drawings holdings. Last week she sold four antique mirrors ranging in price between $18,000 and $40,000 to established collectors; after Old Master drawing week, she expects novice collectors also to make purchases. “Because drawings frequently detail sculpture, acquiring small reliefs, medallions, and ceramic figures is the natural next step for collectors,” the owner of Trinity Fine Art gallery, John Winter, said. He has seen the number of drawings collectors who take on such material almost triple in the past decade. To serve them, Mr. Winter is currently highlighting small sculpture, as well as Italian 16th-century majolica pottery and later ceramic figures, in his gallery.

With increased interest in such fare, prices have climbed. “Twenty years ago, 18th-century porcelain figures by the Italian factory Doccia were a neglected area,” Mr. Winter said. In the 1980s, figures regularly sold for $600 each. Mr. Winter currently has a white 1770 figure of a slave, with her ankles chained, priced at $19,000. Museum interest has also risen, and Mr. Winter has recently made sales to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Mixing antiques with Old Masters is not new, however. There is a tradition of such collecting in America. Mr. Winter pointed to such early collecting titans as J.P. Morgan, railroad magnate Henry Huntington, and art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. But the tradition of including 18th-century French ceramics and furniture with pictures such as Fragonard oils has gone in and out of fashion. “It was totally dead in the ’90s,” said Gerald Stiebel, whose private Upper East Side gallery has made more than 300 sales to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“The ’80s were a boom period when collectors like Henry Kravis followed the lead of Paul Getty in acquiring 18th-century French antiques,” Mr. Stiebel said. The taste for “Fine French Furniture,” he said, goes in cycles.

To tempt a new generation of collectors, Mr. Stiebel is spotlighting a 1710 Louis commode at his gallery. Glittering with gilt ormolu including a satyr mask, the cabinet bears panels of Boullework, a type of brass-in-tortoiseshell marquetry. The objects’s provenance is impeccable: It had been owned by Marquis Ferdinand de Ghistelle (1735-1813), who fled to Westphalia during the French Revolution. Two comparable commodes are in the Paris Louvre. Mr. Stiebel is asking more than $1 million for it. “As long as Bloomie’s continues to sell repros, some people still want the originality that antiques offer,” Mr. Stiebel said.

Meanwhile, sales at the 53rd annual Winter Antiques Show and at auction last week have been strong. Private Americana dealer Leigh Keno quickly sold a 1760 Newport, R.I., mahogany chair for $410,000, a pair of 1740 Queen Anne chairs for $220,000, and a dwarf tall case clock for $245,000.

The folk art market has proved especially strong at the show. On opening night last Wednesday, Connecticut dealer David Schorsch sold an 1825 trade sign from a Maine tavern for an unusually high $750,000. Patrick Bell, who owns Olde Hope Antiques of New Hope, Pa., made 30 sales, including a rig of 24 Long Island decoys for $85,000, a primitive 1835 portrait of a child for $195,000, and a painted chest by the show’s first weekend.

“With so much unrest in the world, folk art appears particularly appealing as it’s from a simpler and quieter time,” Mr. Bell said. That theory could explain why Edward Hicks’s 1849 painting “The Peaceable Kingdom” sold for $6,176,000 last week at Christie’s, exceeding its $4 million high estimate.