Ralph Mayer (1895-1979) was a painter and art conservator. Educated as a chemical engineer, he worked in paint manufacture and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York before going on to teach at Columbia University. He founded the Artists Technical Research Institute in 1959. He is best known as the author of The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques (1940), which is still a point of reference for artists today, and he also wrote The Painter's Craft (1948) and A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques (1969).