Jane Brewster Reid (1862–1966) was an American landscape artist whose long career became closely associated with Nantucket. Born in Chicago and later active in Rochester, New York, Reid was painting on Nantucket by at least 1891 and continued exhibiting island subjects well into the 1930s. Her work included watercolors, etchings, and prints, with cottages, gardens, lanes, coastal views, and familiar Nantucket landmarks among her favorite subjects.

Reid was also a direct descendant of Mayflower passenger Elder William Brewster. A published Brewster genealogy traces her descent through her mother, Jane Hart Brewster Reid, and her maternal grandfather William Brewster.

Her career spanned an extraordinary period in American art. Reid was working on Nantucket before the island's better-known twentieth-century art colony developed and continued painting there as that community flourished. Her watercolors appeared in Henry S. Wyer's 1902 Sea-Girt Nantucket, and by 1907 she was exhibiting with the Boston Art Club. Her Nantucket subjects were later offered through local venues including Miss Sylvia's Shop and the Swimming Duck.

One especially interesting aspect of Reid's practice was her tendency to return to favored locations. Research on the Nantucket art colony notes that when Reid found a setting she particularly liked, she sometimes painted the same scene multiple times, occasionally changing its dimensions.

The Mayflower Descendants Museum holds two original watercolors by Jane Brewster Reid. Because the copyright status of these particular works remains under research, we are not reproducing the paintings online at this time.

One related historic image can, however, be shared.

One of the Museum’s Reid watercolors depicts the same house shown in this historic public-domain postcard. The close similarity allows us to identify the setting while keeping Reid’s original watercolor offline as we continue our copyright research.

Historic postcard of the Sharp House, Nantucket, Massachusetts, c. 1910–1924. H. Marshall Gardiner / Detroit Publishing Co., Phostint process. Mayflower Descendants Museum holdings.

Its former owners have a significant connection that reaches beyond Reid’s watercolor and into another area of the Museum’s research. That history will be explored in a future Museum feature.

Reid lived to the remarkable age of 103, dying in Rochester in 1966. Today, her work provides not only an artistic record of Nantucket but also a link between Mayflower-descendant history, the island's built environment, and an American woman artist whose career stretched from the nineteenth century deep into the twentieth.

Sources and Further Reading

The Brewster Genealogy, 1566–1907, Emma C. Brewster Jones — Reid appears in the William Brewster family line as the daughter of Jane Hart Brewster Reid and granddaughter of William Brewster. The genealogy records Jane Brewster Reid's birth in Chicago on September 28, 1862.
Read The Brewster Genealogy

Ben Simons, “The Nantucket Art Colony” — Discusses Reid's place within Nantucket's developing art colony, her presence on the island beginning by 1891, her inclusion in Sea-Girt Nantucket, her exhibitions and sales on the island, and her practice of painting multiple versions of favored subjects.
Read “The Nantucket Art Colony”

Rafael Osona Auctions — Jane Brewster Reid (1862–1966), Artist Biography — Biographical overview of Reid's career, Nantucket subjects, work in watercolor and printmaking, Boston Art Club affiliation, and institutional representation.
Read the Jane Brewster Reid biography

Artists Association of Nantucket — Permanent Collection — Lists Jane Brewster Reid among the artists represented in the association's permanent collection, which documents the history of Nantucket's art community.
Explore the Artists Association of Nantucket Permanent Collection

Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates — Jane Brewster Reid Nantucket Cottage Watercolor — A useful example of a Reid watercolor depicting a Nantucket colonial house and provides additional context for the architectural subjects she painted.