Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (November 4, 1854 – February 23, 1929) was an English philanthropist and the founder and chief benefactor of the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony located in Woodstock, New York.

While at Oxford, he studied under John Ruskin, who inspired Whitehead's interest in forming a utopian society based on art, craftsmanship, and unity.

[5] Thirty buildings sprang up, including studios, barns, cottages, and a library, as well as the White Pines manor house where the Whitehead family lived.

[6][2] It stood as a "rural, utopian ideal based on the brotherhood of artistic collaboration" and focused on the "art of living through creative manual work."

Hervey White broke with Whitehead in 1905 and started a popular rival artists' colony called the Maverick on a farm across town, while the Art Students League of New York established a summer school of painting in Woodstock in 1906.

The Byrdcliffe papers, including fifteen hundred letters exchanged between Ralph and Jane Whitehead beginning in the 1890s, are held at the Winterthur Library.

[3] Whitehead wrote essay collections entitled Grass of the Desert (Chiswick Press, 1892) and Arrows of the Dawn (1895) and edited Folk-Songs of Eastern Europe (Oliver Ditson, 1922), among other published works.