The poetic paintings and monotypes of Jack Boul are included in the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art as well as the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
Last year, the First Lady of Maryland added his work to the Drawing Room at the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis. Earlier his year, his monotypes were added to the collection of the Library of Congress. Major exhibitions of his work have been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Mint Museum, and Stanford University's Art Gallery in Washington.
In describing his work, curator and author Eric Denker once wrote, “Boul depicts such familiar urban sights as water tanks and train yards with the same acuity as he gives to the charm of a Parisian cafe or a Venetian canal. He is devoted to the beauty of the C&O Canal and has a singular fondness for the shapes of cows. Boul’s artistic interests extend from barnyards to barbershops, from wheelbarrows to watering cans. In each image, his spare, simple constructions attempt to convey the essential, characteristic elements of his motif.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Boul grew up in the South Bronx and attended the American Artist’s School in New York, before serving in the Army during World War II. After the war, he moved to Seattle where he studied on at the Cornish School of Art, graduating in 1951. Later that year he moved to Washington DC to continue his studies at American University. He exhibited in the Annual Area Exhibition at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1951, and again in 1954, 1956, and 1958.

In 1957 Jack Boul received his first solo showing, at the Franz Bader Gallery, attracting positive reviews that cited him as a promising young artist. In 1960 he had a one-man show at the Watkins Gallery at American University, where later he began to teach in 1969. During his fifteen years as a professor of art at American University, Boul showed regularly at the Watkins Gallery.
He had his first museum exhibition in 1974 at the Baltimore Museum of Art in a three-person show that garnered positive notices. In 1984, after fifteen years teaching at American University, Boul became one of the first faculty members of the new Washington Studio School. He retired from teaching in 1994 to devote his time to printmaking and painting.
In 2000, Boul had a one-man show at the Corcoran . In a review of that show, longtime Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote:
“Boul is excellent at benign glimpses. His subjects are as unthreatening as a stroll in the country or a visit to the Phillips. He sees an empty wheelbarrow bright in the back yard, glowing in the sunshine of a summer afternoon, and in a few strokes captures the essence of that vision. His monotype technique evokes Edgar Degas’. The modernists of Paris liked to walk through neighborhoods and record the quotidian. Boul sees a bald man in a barbershop getting a haircut, and, through a flurry of his dispersed markings, so do we. He sees a couple dining in Baltimore at Haussner’s, or his wife reading the newspaper in the living room, or cows. Nice bucolic cows. The man makes pleasant pictures.”