Lucius Rossi was an Italian genre painter who has worked and lived in Paris.
Rossi trained at the Academy San Luca in Rome. He was strongly influenced by the Romantic painters, and also the Spanish artist Marià Fortuny.
Rossi left Italy to settle in Paris in 1867, where he began to work as a designer for magazines, including the illustrated British newspaper "The Graphic".
In Paris he became close to the European high bourgeoisie; his commissions included a portrait of the family of William Waldorf Astor, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. He is also said to have been close to Count Tyszkiewicz, the great Polish collector and sponsor.
Rossi had success at the Paris Salon and for a time worked exclusively for the leading Parisian dealer Adolphe Goupil. Goupil’s strategy was to promote artists wishing to extend their audiences, and he encouraged artists that made huge historical paintings to start to make smaller paintings that might be reproduced as prints or photographs. Rossi's genre subjects, with heightened detail and intrigue, fitted this brief perfectly and were eminently reproducible.
His artwork, full of fragility, is characterized by his sense of details. Feminine figure is one of his recurrent theme. He represented woman in interior scenes usually personal or in the middle of a romantic conversation.