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Louis George Bouche | |
| Birth Date: March 18, 1896 |
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| Death Date: August 7, 1969 Artist Gallery |
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| Born in New York City to French parents, Louis Bouché was encouraged as a child to draw. His grandfather was a Barbizon painter, a friend of Millet and Daubigny. His father, Henri L Bouché, an architectural decorator, worked with the major turn-of-the-century architects designing interiors, such as the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island and the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, New York City.
At the age 12, following the death of his father, Bouché was taken to France by his mother. In Paris, he studied at the Atelier Colarossi, the Academié de la Grand Chaumiere and the Ecoloe des Beaus-Arts.
Returning to the United States in 1915, Bouché continued his formal art training at the Art Students League until 1916 and eventually becoming one of their teachers for many years. After serving in the United States Navy, he resumed his painting career.
Bouché established his reputation as a muralist and as a painter of representational, picturesque genre scenes. In addition to landscapes, Bouché was intrigues by urban interiors, such as barbershops, bowling alleys, cheap flats and theatrical dressing rooms. In fact, when the Pennsylvania Railroad wanted an artist to paint murals for its new streamlined club cars a generation later, the choice fell logically on Louis Bouché. Because he enjoyed good cigars, good brandy and told good stories about his famous friends, he was temperamentally suited to decorate a club car.
For many years he kept a studio on West Tenth Street and also painted murals at Radio City Music Hall, the Justice and Interior Departments in Washington D.C. and the Eisenhower Foundation building in Abilene, Kansas.
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