Nano Reid trained at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where she studied under Seán Keating and Harry Clarke.Afterwards she travelled to Paris, enrolling at the Grand Chaumiere academy along with other Irish artists such as Kathleen Fox. Reid then attended the Central School in London, studying under Bernard Meninsky. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Dublin Painters Gallery in 1934. After returning to Ireland, Reid spent the rest of her life in Drogheda, concentrating on painting aspects of local life and landscapes. However, her paintings are in no way bound by a sense of locality, but are accomplished essays in painterly abstraction. In 1950, along with Norah
McGuinness, Reid represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale.

The painting The Bottling Store, exhibited at the Dawson Gallery in 1959, takes as its subject the cellar of the pub in Drogheda which was the Reid family business. It is difficult to discern the figures, doors and shelves in this representation of a bottling store so completely has the painter given herself over to an exploration of painterly abstraction, using a characteristically restricted palette of browns, greens and ochres. The watercolour The Thrush is a joyous evocation of the song of the thrush, rendered in visual terms, while River Edge, another watercolour, is a composition in which the simplified outlines of birds are subsidiary to the free and expressive markmaking used by the artist to evoke the abundance of life and energy in the
landscape.

— PM