Louis Bouché

Louis George Bouché was a first-generation American who was born to French parents in New York City in 1896. Upon the death of his father in 1909, his mother moved the family back to France. At the age of thirteen, he began training as an artist at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Bouché returned to the United States six years later in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. He continued his studies at the Art Students League in New York City, where he shared a studio with fellow artist Alexander Brook. He exhibited paintings at the Whitney Club and the Salon of Independent Artists. From 1922 to 1926, he managed the Belmaison Galleries at the Wanamaker’s department store, where he organized exhibitions of modern art. By the late 1920s, he turned his focus to mural painting. He produced murals for private residences, painted stage panels for the Radio City Music Hall, and decorated club cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad in New York. In the late 1930s, he accepted commissions to paint murals at the U.S. Department of Justice building and the U.S. Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. At various points in his career, he taught at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, the University of Cincinnati, and Drake University.