(b Dieppe, 19 Sept 1807; d Dieppe, 14 Dec 1872). French sculptor and painter. Employed in infancy in chalk-quarries and subsequently as a cobbler in Rouen and Paris, he returned to his native town in 1827, where he married and attended drawing-school while earning a living in local ivory and alabaster workshops. In 1836 he went to work in the Paris studio of Pierre-Jean David d’Angers. After his return to Dieppe in 1838, his reputation steadily increased as a sculptor in ivory, unbaked clay, terracotta, wood and alabaster. His small reliefs, figures and groups representing sailors, fisher-folk, vagrants and scenes from local life were appreciated by his more unassuming compatriots and acquired by tourists. Graillon retained the manner of a man of the people, and in his sculpture and paintings a deliberate roughness of treatment is allied to a strong formal sense and an instinct for natural grouping. He generally avoided the historical and exotic subjects that were the mainstay of the 19th-century statuette industry and was exceptional among contemporary sculptors in his preference for the ordinary local theme. A strain of romantic ‘misérabilisme’ in his work finds allegorical expression in the group Misery (terracotta, 1854; Dieppe, Château–Mus.), and there are echoes of earlier genre painters like David Teniers II, particularly noticeable in the relief of Card-players (terracotta, 1849; Rennes, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.). Remarkably (in that they are little more than seaside souvenirs), Graillon’s works anticipate the subjects and treatment of the Realists. He felt occasional dissatisfaction with his modest status. According to David d’Angers, this was exacerbated by a visit paid to him in 1858 by Napoleon III. In the following year, Graillon executed a life-size statue of Abraham Duquesne (bronze, Dieppe, Château–Mus.). After his death, his two sons, César (1831–?c. 1900) and Félix (1833–1893), continued to work in their father’s idiom.