French landscape painter Victor de Grailly,
1804-1889, worked in a Hudson River School landscape style, and possibly
lived in the states sometime during the period of 1840 to 1870, but no
supporting evidence has emerged to confirm that. Most of his compositions of
American scenes were based the engravings by William Henry Bartlett in the
Nathaniel P. Willis 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 named “Sears,”[1]
De Grailly was 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.[2]
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. Other museums DeGrailly’s work can be seen in include the New-York
Historical Society, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The West Point Museum, NY; the
Baltimore Museum, MD and the White House collection, Washington, DC.[3]
While done from a Bartlett print, the actual location of this composition still exists today. While superseded in the 1920’s with the construction of higher altitude Route 9-W on the west bank of the Hudson to meet the newly constructed Bear Mountain Bridge, old Dunderberg road is now quasi maintained as a bicycle trail in Bear Mountain state park. It can be seen on old United States Geological Survey topo maps from the 1890’s.
R.A.B.
