John Charles Felix Rossi (1762–1839)

Sculptor born in Nottingham. His obituarist in the Gentleman’s Magazine adds that he was brought up in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, and the Art-Union that his father was a quack-doctor from Siena. Rossi first studied under, then worked for, the sculptor Giovanni Battista Locatelli (1734–1805). In 1781 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, winning a silver medal the same year and a gold medal in 1784; he exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1782–1834. In 1785 he won the travelling scholarship and went to Rome, staying until 1788. On his return he worked for the clock-maker, Benjamin Vulliamy, modelling figures in Derby porcelain. About this same time, he entered into a partnership with mason-sculptor John Bingley. In 1796, the two men collaborated on the terracotta figures of Music and Dancing on the façade of the Assembly Rooms, Leicester (1796). He also worked for Coade’s of Lambeth, the manufacturers of architectural sculpture in durable artificial stone, an example of his work for Coade being the seated Britannia, atop the dome of Liverpool town hall (1801–02). Later Rossi was to develop an artificial stone of his own composition (and which he employed on Buckingham Palace, 1827–29). In 1798 he was elected an Associate Royal Academician and in 1802 a full Royal Academician (his diploma work was a marble bust of the architect George Dance). His services were now in demand and he received a number of prestigious commissions, none more so than those for national monuments to military heroes of the Napoleonic wars in St Paul’s Cathedral. The earliest, the monument to Captain Robert Faulknor of 1803, was perhaps his last collaboration with Bingley, the partnership having lost him money. There followed monuments to Captains Mosse and Riou (1803-05); Charles, 1st Marquess Cornwallis (1811); and Vice-Admiral Lord Rodney (1811–15). Rossi also executed the monument to General John Le Marchant (d. 1812), designed by his former assistant, James Smith (1775–1815), just before the latter’s untimely death. But with so many large-scale, multi-figure works in progress simultaneously, Rossi allowed the standards of his workshop to slip. As the diarist Joseph Farington noted, ‘Rossi had by employing ordinary men at low wages got much money by it, but had greatly suffered in reputation’. His career faltered and he even considered taking up an invitation from King Christophe to go to Haiti to execute sculpture for his palaces. He decided to stay in England, however, and business started to pick up. In 1819, in partnership with one of his sons, Henry Rossi, he won a commission to execute four colossal caryatids in terracotta for the new church of St Pancras, London, and in the 1820s he managed to attract the attention of George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, who commissioned two sculptures, Celadon and Amelia (1820) and The Pugilist (1828), for his country seat, Petworth House, in West Sussex. Rossi’s portrait busts were considered by his contemporaries to be among his finest work and he held the post of sculptor to both George IV and William IV. Despite his royal appointment and his winning more commissions for the monuments in St Paul’s than any of his contemporaries, he was often in poverty – his large family (sixteen children from two marriages) coupled with his self-confessed lack of financial acumen, resulting in him bequeathing to his family, according to his obituary in the Art-Union, ‘nothing but his fame’.

Bibliography: Art-Union, 15 March 1839, p. 22 (obituary); J. Bryant, ‘Rossi, John Charles Felix (1762–1839)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn), 2004; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 124–26, 127; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. xi, xiii, xiv, 54, 72–74; J. Farington (ed. J. Greig), The Farington Diary (8 vols), London, 1922–1928), passim; The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1839, pp. 547–48 (obituary); A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, (1905–06), Vol. VI (Oakes–Rymsdyk), 1906, pp. 371–74; A. Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone, Upton-upon-Severn, 1990, pp. 48, 77, 92, 106n39, 122, 173–74, 211, 221, 225–26, 230; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. xi, xx, 126–27; Royal Academy of Arts: Charles Rossi RA (1762–1839)’; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 13, 154–55; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1055–62; J.T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, (1828), London, 1986, pp. 76, 78, 142, 206, 254, 291, 306, 308; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London, (1964), 2^nd integrated edn 1988, pp. 362, 363, 366, 367–69, 374, 380.

Terry Cavanagh, June 2025