[1] Paul Sibra is nicknamed “le peintre du Lauragais”, after his native region.

Following the Great War, Paul Sibra was part of the general movement called “return to order”, that rejected the excesses of the avant-garde and encouraged a revival of classicism and realistic painting.

Sibra was close to the félibrige movement and he built his fame portraying defenders of the occitanian culture and language such as poets, writers and actors.

Early in his career, Sibra’s ambition of documenting the Lauragais countryside and everyday life led him to create a corpus of thousands of drawings along with notes, compiled in sketchbooks.

This methodical survey, even if uncompleted, is an extremely valuable document for our understanding of the Lauragais rural life of mid-twentieth Century, before the definitive mechanization of farming practices.