De Grailly learned his craft under the French artist Jean Victor Bertin.  At the Salon from 1830 to 1880, he regularly exhibited landscapes in the manner of, or as direct copies from, seventeenth-century Dutch masters.  Copies by him of Van Ruisdael and Hobbema are known.  De Grailly's most successful works, however, have been the execution of parlor-sized canvases after engravings of William Henry Bartlett's views of the eastern United States in American Scenery, published in England in 1838.  Though there is no reason to think that De Grailly ever left his native country, such a number of the American views after Bartlett are in this country, often several representations of the same scene, that one wonders whether there was an outlet for his work in the United States.