Sybold van Ravesteyn (1889–1983), a civil engineer who graduated from the Delft Polytechnic School in 1912, began his career with Staatsspoorwegen, the Dutch national railway company. From 1918 onward, based in Utrecht in the center of the Netherlands, he assisted architect George W. van Heukelom in the design and construction of the company’s main offices (now the national monument De Inktpot).

Alongside his architectural work, he developed his first furniture and interiors, produced in collaboration with cabinetmaker Gerrit Th. Rietveld in Utrecht. Deeply involved in local and national cultural life, Van Ravesteyn associated with avant-garde architects, artists, writers, and filmmakers, both Dutch and international. As an author, he published a number of writings demonstrating a profound knowledge of art history and contemporary architecture.

It was in this fertile context that his modernity emerged, visible in his furniture, lighting, typography, and in his significant preserved architectural works: several Dutch railway stations, his own house in Utrecht, the Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam, as well as interior designs for the Kunstmin Theater in Dordrecht and the Royal Yacht Piet Hein.

In 1925, Van Ravesteyn presented his work at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Among the pieces shown was a black-and-white chair, as part of a bedroom set for the Dutch patron and bibliophile René Radermacher Schorer in Utrecht. Its asymmetry stood in contrast to the prevailing French Art Deco aesthetic.

His style was characterized by formal refinement and distinctive expressiveness. In Paris in 1925, he attracted the attention of Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles, for whom he designed a bedroom in their modernist villa in Hyères, by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

His black-and-white chair, designed in December 1924, also drew the attention of Irish designer Eileen Gray, who exhibited it in her Paris gallery, Jean Désert.

Nearly half a century later, Andrée Putman included it in the ECART catalog.

- Monique Teunissen