Victor DeGrailly. French. Niagara Falls: View of the American Falls from Goat Island. Oil on canvas. French artist Victor DeGrailly gained considerable popularity in the United States for his landscape paintings of American views. Although there is some speculation that DeGrailly may have been in the United States from 1840 to 1870, there is no concrete evidence to support this as many of DeGrailly’s American landscapes were based on engravings from British artist-adventurer William Henry Bartlett’s American Scenery series published in London in 1840. Nevertheless, DeGrailly’s lively scenes found a ready audience in the United States and his work was exhibited in locales as diverse as Charleston, South Carolina; Baltimore, Toronto, New York, Brooklyn, Albany, and Sandusky, Ohio. In 1854, a number of his paintings were auctioned in Portland, Maine. Based on Bartlett’s engraving, DeGrailly’s painting depicts a similar view of Niagara Falls: Although he precisely copied the topographical and architectural features…he introduced figures that would be more at home on the banks of the Seine than on the Potomac or Hudson. DeGrailly was born in Paris and began his art studies under Jean Victor Bertin, a neo-classical landscape painter who also taught Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. DeGrailly first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1833, where he continued to show his paintings until 1880. He made copies of works by Claude Lorrain, but also painted original compositions of French, Italian, and British landscapes. His paintings can be found in important public collections, including The White House, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and the West Point Museum. Size 17 - 1/4" x 23 - 1/8".