While he has lived in Rome for more than 40 years, most of Peter Rockwell’s work has been shown in the U.S., where he has received the majority of his commissions. As a result, he has returned to the U.S. a number of times and has had solo shows here frequently since 1968. His work has been exhibited at several galleries including the Batholet in New York, Shore Galleries in Boston, Newman Galleries in Philadelphia, and the Mickelson Gallery in Washington. His sculptures are in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Bridgeport Museum of American Art in Bridgeport, Conn., and in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., which has the largest single collection of his sculptures.

Many of Rockwell’s bronzes reflect his early fascination with the circus and acrobatics, animals in motion, and with the work of 19th-century English photographer Edward Muybridge. His sculpture in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, called Family at Play, depicts children and adults holding hands, dancing in a circle.

Since the early 1970s, when he was commissioned to design gargoyles for the National Cathedral in Washington, Rockwell has also been intrigued by stone carvings of monsters and grotesques. Monsters were the subject of one of his larger sculptures, The Climbing Stone,”which was permanently installed on Haverford’s campus in the spring of 1990 alongside Magill Library. Rockwell created the sculpture as a gift to the College in memory of his teacher and friend Wallace Kelly.