Like so many other American sculptors, Charles Grafly gained early experience by working during his youth at a local stonecutter's yard, in this case in Philadelphia. His formal art training began at the Spring Garden Institute and continued, in 1884, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied under Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshutz. In Paris in 1888, he entered the Académie Julian and eventually the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Henri Chapu, and Tony Robert-Fleury. Grafly debuted in the Paris Salon of 1890, and in the following year's Salon he received an honorable mention. He returned to Philadelphia in 1892, briefly taught modeling at the Drexel Institute, and began a teaching career at the Pennsylvania Academy that was to continue, with some interruptions, for the rest of his life. In 1895 he made a second trip to Paris to study with the sculptor Jean-Auguste Dampt.
Grafly's professional life as a productive artist began with his final return to the United States in 1896. He soon made a name for himself as a creator of symbolic groups and of incisive portrait busts. During the next several decades he gained major commissions, including allegorical representations of France and Great Britain for the U.S. Customs House in New York and the memorial to the Civil War General George Meade unveiled in Washington, D.C., in 1927.
Grafly's many awards attest to early approval from his fellow artists. Medals were given for his work shown in the Paris Salon, the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893); the Atlanta International Exposition (1895); the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo (1901); and the Charleston (S.C.) Exposition (1902). He began exhibiting at the Academy during the first decade of the twentieth century. He received the Academy's Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal in the 1918 winter exhibition for a bust portrait of Childe Hassam (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
In addition to heading the sculpture department of the Pennsylvania Academy for thirty-six years, Grafly, starting in 1917, taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a charter member of the National Sculpture Society and, in 1899, was elected to the Society of American Artists. He also was a member of the Architectural League of New York, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
