The Story of Judy Methuen
It was a true “pinch yourself” moment, the day Judy Methuen – teacher, scientist, sculptor and lifelong Shakespeare enthusiast – discovered that her family shared ancestors with the Cobbe family, in whose possession the latest Shakespeare portrait – and the only one supposed to have been painted from life – had been discovered. It must have seemed like taking a giant step closer to the Bard…
Judy Methuen is no stranger to the quirks of fate.
Having grown up in the north with a scientist’s head, a teacher’s heart and an artist’s soul, Judy had dreamed of life in Stratford-on-Avon in an abstract way while enjoying theatre and Shakespeare in the Drama Society of her university. She earned extra cash to supplement her student life by playing piano and singing at local bars and spent her free time copying old masters in watercolour to give to her family and friends.
Judy’s life took many twists and turns. Through teaching, motherhood and running her own business, fate led her eventually to owning a gallery in the town she dreamed of belonging to many years before.
From here Judy began to restore fine art and paint again, remembering the girl she once was and reawakening her creative passions, including those for all things ‘Bard’. She delighted in finding herself in the home of the most famous theatre company in the world……and a few short years later she was engaged by them as an artist and prop maker. From a dream on a motorway to the Royal Shakespeare Company, fate had a way of sending her in the right direction.
The realisation that there existed a link between her and the Cobbe portrait of William Shakespeare was clearly another of fate’s little nudges. Perusal of the Methuen family tree revealed that in the mid-1700s, Paul Methuen of Adderbury, then MP for Warwick, married one Christiana Cobbe.
Finding out that the Cobbe portrait was not just a link to the Shakespearean history she loved, but to her own personal history as well came as a suprise. But as with many true artists, the unexpected revelation presented a challenge Judy’s creative side just couldn’t ignore. This site charts Judy Methuen’s journey to re-imagine Shakespeare as a sculptor and documents her work creating the Methuen Shakespeare bust and her other work as a sculptor to date.
