The Reid surname reaches Irish records by more than one route. In Scotland, Reid is the characteristic Scots spelling of a byname for someone with red or auburn hair, related to Reed. Many families carried the name across the North Channel into Ulster during the seventeenth-century plantation period. Irish-language surname evidence also records Reid as an anglicised form of Ó Maoildeirg, so the spelling alone does not establish one origin or lineage.
The Reid name in Irish artistic history belongs to one of the most individual and most admired painters of the twentieth century — a Drogheda-born expressionist whose landscapes of the Irish midlands gave that understated terrain a visual intensity it had rarely received before.
Where Did the Reid Family Come From?
Many Ulster Reids established themselves across Antrim, Down, and Derry within Scots-Irish Presbyterian communities. The name appears in church and land records from the seventeenth century onward, and Reid families participated in the linen trade, market-town commerce, and civic life. Other Irish Reid families may reflect the Ó Maoildeirg route, so parish registers, civil certificates, wills, and land records are needed to identify a particular branch. County Louth in Leinster produced the name's most celebrated Irish artistic figure.
Who Was Nano Reid and Why Does She Matter?
Nano Reid was born in Drogheda, County Louth, in 1905, the daughter of a publican, and trained at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art before studying in Paris and London in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She returned to Drogheda and spent most of her working life in that town, painting the landscapes of County Louth and the surrounding midland counties with an expressionist freedom and a richness of colour that distinguished her work completely from the more cautious literal tradition of Irish landscape painting.
Her palette — rich ochres, deep greens, heavy blues, the sombre light of the Irish midlands — and her gestural, loose brushwork gave her paintings a physical immediacy that struck audiences as both distinctively Irish and internationally aware. She was elected a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949, and in 1950 she and Norah McGuinness represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale — the most prestigious international exhibition of contemporary art — in one of the defining moments of Irish visual art's postwar engagement with the international scene. Her subsequent reputation has grown steadily, and she is now recognised as one of the most significant Irish painters of the mid-twentieth century.
Where Are Reid Families Found Today?
In Ireland, historical Reid records are especially visible across Antrim, Down, Derry, and Louth. Some reflect Scottish migration into Ulster and others may connect with an Irish-language origin. Reid families also travelled widely along eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migration routes to North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Because the surname can have different beginnings, geography and original records matter more than a single surname story.
For heritage pieces that reflect these Scottish and Irish routes, browse our Reid Scottish and Irish family heritage gifts.