BOULLE, ANDRE CHARLES French cabi net-maker, who gave his name to a fashion of inlaying known as Boulle or Buhl work. He was born in Paris Nov. II 1642, and died there Feb. 29 173 2. The son of Jean Boulle, a member of a family of cabinet-makers who had already achieved distinction, he became very famous and was, indeed, the second cabinet-maker —the first was Jean Mace—who has acquired individual renown. At the age of 3o he had already been granted one of those lodgings in the galleries of the Louvre set apart for the most talented of the artists employed by the Crown. Boulle was given the deceased Jean Mace's own lodging in 1672 by Louis XIV. In the patent conferring this privilege he is described also as "chaser, gilder and maker of marqueterie." He was employed for many years at Versailles, where the mirrored walls, the floors of "wood mosaic," the inlaid panelling and the pieces in marqueterie in the Cabinet du Dauphin were regarded as his most remarkable work. These rooms were long since dismantled and their contents dispersed, but Boulle's draw ings for the work are in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs. Not only the most magnificent of French monarchs, but foreign princes and the great nobles and financiers of his own country crowded him with commissions, and the mot of the abbe de Marolles, "Boulle y tourne en ovale," has become a stock quotation in the litera ture of French cabinet-making.
Boulle was by no means the first Frenchman to practise the art of marqueterie, nor was he quite the inventor of the peculiar type of inlay which is chiefly associated with his name ; but no artist, before or since, has used these motives with such astonish ing skill, courage and surety. He produced pieces of monumental solidity blazing with harmonious colour, or gleaming with the sober and dignified reticence of ebony, ivory and white metal.
Boulle improved upon the work of Renaissance artists by in laying brass devices into wood or tortoise-shell, which last he greatly used according to the design he had immediately in view, whether flowers, scenes, scrolls, etc. ; to these he sometimes added enamelled metal. Indeed the use of tortoise-shell became so char acteristic that any furniture, however cheap and common, which has a reddish background that might by the ignorant be mistaken for inlay, is now described as "Buhl"—a name invented by the British auctioneer and furniture-maker.
See Havard, Les Boulles (1893) ; C. Asselineau, Andre Boulle (1872) and Comte Francois de Salverte, Les Ebenistes du XVIII. Siecle (1927).