Henri Loubat (1855–1926) was born in Gaillac, in southwestern France, on 10 January 1855. He first learned drawing from the local painter Charles Valette, then moved to Toulouse, where he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and studied under painters including Jules de Lacger and Gabriel Golse between 1876 and 1879. His fellow students included the sculptors Labatut and Sul-Abadié and the younger painter Henri Martin.
He showed a portrait in Toulouse in 1877, and two years later sent three more portraits to an exhibition in Castres. Portraits, still lifes and rural scenes make up most of his surviving work, among them harvest pictures such as Les faucheurs of 1909, painted in the bright, loose manner of French landscape painting around 1900.
Loubat spent his career as a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, where he was professor for forty-three years. He died there on 14 July 1926, aged seventy-one, shortly after the city had entrusted him with a large decorative panel for the foyer of the Théâtre du Capitole.