Bouché's grandfather, Ernest Bouché, was a French Barbizon painter; his father, Henry Bouché, designed jewelry for Tiffany's and did interior designs for Stanford White. Louis attended the Collegiate School in New York before going to Paris with his family in 1909. In Paris he studied at the Lycée Carnot, Académie Colarossi, La Grand Chaumiere, and in the ateliers of Jules Bernard and Bernard Naudlin. Returning to New York with his family in 1915, he studied with Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League, 1915-16.
In 1917 Bouché was sharing a studio with Alexander Brook; in the same year he joined Walt Kuhn's Penguin Club, and exhibited in the Independents Exhibition. He ran Wanamaker's department store's Belmaison Galleries from 1921 to 1926. His own work was represented by the Daniel Gallery from 1918 to 1931, and by the Kraushaar Galleries after 1936.
Bouché taught at the Art Students League from 1944 to 1965, and at the Academy School from 1951 to 1966. With his long-standing friend, John Carroll, he opened a summer school at Old Chatham, New York, in 1951; Carroll's classes were in portrait and figure painting, while Bouché taught the landscape classes. Bouché moved to Woodstock in 1956.
Bouché was a proficient muralist. He did murals for the lounge at New York's Radio City Music Hall, and in Washington, Activities of the Department of Justice, 1937, for that federal department's new building, and Conservation--Western Lands, 1938, for the Department of the Interior. He executed Establishment of the First Post Office In Ellenville in 1823 for the post office at Ellenville, New York, of 1942. In 1954 the Academy's Edwin Austin Abbey Mural Fund awarded Bouché and Ross Moffett the commission for the murals at the Eisenhower Foundation at Abilene, Kansas.
A regular contributor to Academy annual exhibitions, Bouché received the Adolph and Clara Obrig Prize in 1951, and Altman prizes in 1955 and 1962. He also was an active participant in administration of the Academy, serving two three-year terms on its Council, 1951-54 and 1956-59, and as corresponding secretary from 1959 to 1966.
