John Charles Felix Rossi

[1] Rossi was born on 8 March 1762 at Nottingham, where his father Ananso,[2] an Italian from Siena, was a quack doctor[3] According to some sources the family later moved to Mountsorrel in Leicestershire,[2][4] but by 1776, they were living at 9, Haymarket, in London, where the sculptor Giovanni Battista Locatelli, who had just arrived from Italy, came to lodge with them.

[5] On completing his apprenticeship he remained with his master for wages of 18 shillings a week, until he found more lucrative employment at Coade and Seeley's artificial stone works at Lambeth.

[6] In around 1790 he went into business in partnership with John Bingley, a London mason, producing work in a form of terracotta or artificial stone.

"[9] In 1800 Rossi made an artificial stone folly in the form of a "Hindu temple" at Melchet Park, near Romsey to the designs of Thomas Daniell.

[1] During the early years of the 19th century Rossi won several prestigious commissions for monuments to military and naval heroes to be set up in St. Paul's Cathedral, including those to Captain Robert Faulkner (1803), Marquis Cornwallis (1811), Lord Rodney(1811–15) and General Le Marchant (1812).

Some of these were elaborate compositions in the grand manner; Cornwallis stands on a pedestal above the three figures representing Britannia and the rivers Begareth and Ganges, denoting the British empire in Asia.

In the monument to Captain Faulkner, Neptune is seated on a rock, in the act of catching the naked figure of a dying sailor, while Victory is about to crown him with laurel.

[17] A contemporary report described the terracotta used for the capitals as "a modern composition of Mr. Rossi's invention, which it is hoped will rival in firmness and durability the same description of material of the ancients".

[17] In 1816 Rossi was one of the experts questioned by a select committee of the House of Commons enquiring into whether the government should purchase the sculptures from the Parthenon then in the possession of Lord Elgin.

[22] In 1818 he went into partnership with his former student J. G. Bubb to provide a large number of sculptures for the new Customs House in London for which they used a composition material of their own design, a form of terracotta, but within six years the badly-constructed building had been demolished.

[12] The Earl of Egremont commissioned Rossi to execute several works for Petworth, including Celadon and Amelia (c.1821)[23] and the British Pugilist or Athleta Britannicus (1828), a statue of a boxer, almost two metres tall, carved from a single piece of marble.