Inspired by: An Extraordinary Collector, Jean-Marie Rossi

INSPIRED BY | MASTERS & MUSES | WORLD OF CABANA

Jean-Marie Rossi (1930-2021) collected with instinct, not ambition. An aesthète of rare restraint, he chose objects for their presence, not their prestige. Next month, Sotheby’s France reunites the works he showed publicly with those he lived with privately, revealing his quietly radical vision. Fabrizia Caracciolo explores the life and legacy of Jean-Marie Rossi, an inspirational, and truly Parisian, aesthète.

BY FABRIZIA CARACCIOLO | MASTERS & MUSES | 10 FEBRUARY 2026

Jean-Marie Rossi's home in Rueil-Malmaison, Paris © Matthieu Salvaing

Jean-Marie Rossi was not a collector driven by accumulation, nor an antiquarian governed solely by knowledge. The French antique dealer – who was a notable figure on the Parisian design scene before his death in 2021 – was, above all, an aesthète: someone for whom taste was not a performance but a discipline, cultivated daily through looking, living, and choosing. His relationship with art was intimate and instinctive.

Objects mattered, not because of their name or date, but because of their presence and ability to hold space – to endure silence, to grow familiar without ever becoming ordinary. For Rossi, interior decoration was the truest expression of this sensibility.

Next month, Sotheby’s will bring together, for the first time, the two worlds that defined Rossi: the works he presented publicly at his legendary Aveline gallery on Place Beauvau, and those he chose to live with, quietly, in his house in Rueil-Malmaison. Conceived as a true retrospective, the sale reads as a discreet memoir, told through furniture, paintings, and objects patiently assembled over a lifetime. 

Rossi’s house in Rueil-Malmaison was never conceived as a showcase, but as a private landscape, shaped slowly and deliberately. Designed by Claudio Briganti, a leading pupil of Renzo Mongiardino, the interior rejected the temptations of minimalism in favour of layering, memory, and nuance. Rooms unfolded organically, each one composed like a still life, always attentive to proportion, patina, and light.

Here, periods overlapped without friction, 18th-century furniture conversed with modern and contemporary works, textures softened the rigour of history, and comfort was never sacrificed to erudition. Nothing announced itself loudly. Everything had been chosen to last, and to be lived with, rather than admired from a distance.

Decoration, for Rossi, was not about effect, but about atmosphere: the quiet art of making a space hospitable to thought, conversation, and time. At the heart of this world was his celebrated “open table.” Friends, artists, collectors, and confidants gathered there, not as guests, but as participants in a shared ritual. Conversations unfolded around the table, surrounded by objects with meaning and purpose. 

Jean-Marie Rossi's home in Rueil-Malmaison, Paris © Matthieu Salvaing

The house revealed itself most fully in these moments—a theatrical space where Rossi's personality and inimitable eye was uniquely expressed. The selection presented at Sotheby’s bears the unmistakable imprint of this lived harmony. Masterpieces of 18th-century French furniture—attributed to Bernard Van Riesen Burgh, Mathieu Criaerd, and Philippe Claude Montigny—sit alongside works by Jean Fautrier, Paul Jouve, Carlo Bugatti, and others. Their coexistence feels neither calculated nor provocative; it reflects, instead, a deeply internal logic, a sense of balance refined over decades.

Rossi's children, Marella, Fritz and Cynthia Rossi, describe the sale as a tribute. "It tells the story of our father’s eye, curiosity, and exacting standards," they said in a joint statement. "We grew up surrounded by these objects, which were as much a part of his life as of his profession. Seeing them brought together, for the first time, is deeply moving—it is a way of keeping his memory alive and passing on the love of beauty and discovery that drove him. We are happy that these works, which he loved so deeply and patiently assembled, can now continue their journey and meet new eyes.”

Jean-Marie Rossi's home in Rueil-Malmaison, Paris © Matthieu Salvaing

Four years after his passing, this auction is an act of remembrance. Through these works, a way of seeing re-emerges—one rooted in discretion, curiosity, and fidelity to one’s own eye. For more than 60 years, Jean-Marie Rossi contributed quietly yet decisively to French cultural life, reinforcing Paris’s role as a capital not only of art, but of taste. What the sale presents today is not merely a collection dispersed, but a world momentarily reassembled: a life composed as carefully as an interior, where beauty was never separate from living, and where art, once chosen, became part of daily existence.

“A brilliant, open-minded, and resolutely avant-garde man, Jean-Marie Rossi marked his era through his taste and expertise, but also through that distinctly Milanese elegance that defined him so well—rooted in the Italian origins he loved to recall," says Mario Tavella, President of Sotheby’s France. "A charismatic, colorful personality for whom nothing was impossible, he helped inspire an entire generation of antiquarians, artists, and art dealers. Bigger than life, as the Anglo-Saxons would say."