French painter Victor de Grailly, 1804-1889, working in a Hudson River School landscape style, is said to have lived in the United States from 1840 to 1870, but, according to Peter Falk, "no evidence has been found to confirm this statement".

Most of his paintings of American scenes were based on engravings he saw in France in William Henry Bartlett's book, "American Scenery, London, 1840". De Grailly studied in France with neo-classical landscape painter Victor Bertin, whose influence remained with De Grailly, although a more romantic feeling developed in his later work.

According to one source, De Grailly was also profoundly influenced by a trip to the United States and a journey up the Hudson River that he made as a young man, painting scenes of the Hudson based on Bartlett prints.

He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1833 and continued to exhibit, but with less frequency, until 1880. De Grailly was only moderately responsive to the Barbizon painters, preferring to paint in the idealized landscape style he learned from Bertin.

Victor De Grailly's work was included in the exhibition, "All That Is Glorious Around Us: Paintings From The Hudson River School", that traveled to the Westmoreland Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, August 10 - October 26, 1997; Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, January 20 - May 17, 1998; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, March 13 - June 27, 1999; and the National Academy of Design, New York City, July 14 - September 12, 1999. A book of the same title was written by John Driscoll and published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, in 1997.

De Grailly's work was also shown in an exhibition in 2003 of 19th-Century paintings from public and private collections, Poetic Joining: The Hudson River and the Highlands, at the Putnam County Historical Society and Foundry School Museum, Cold Spring, New York.