200 THE PORTRAIT GALLERY 
THE FOUNDER OF LIVESTOCK BREEDING 
78. RoBERT BAKEWELL was the pioneer artisan of modern live- 
stock breeding. Born in Leicestershire about 1725, he found 
early advantage over his contemporaries by a thorough educa- 
tion in anatomy, at that time in its very rudiments as a science. 
About 1750 he acceded to the management of his father’s farm 
and immediately put into application the knowledge of animal 
form he had acquired in his earlier training. The livestock of 
his period were most heterogeneous, a condition brought about 
as a result of crossing Flemish stocks to both cattle and horses, 
and Spanish wools to sheep. His early breeding is veiled in 
darkest secrecy. He is reputed jealously to have excluded from 
his breeding pens those who would study his methods and results, 
and to have many times kept animals that would be barred from 
breeding use on other estates. Be that as it may, it is most 
likely probable that his apparent secrecy simply lay in his 
inability to explain in his earlier successes the reasons for the 
homogeneity which was attained by his inbreeding and the per- 
fection of type which accrued from his recognition of the rela- 
tion of external form to internal values. 
Robert BAKEWELL achieved success in each of the four prin- 
cipal races of livestock; Leicester sheep, Longhorn cattle, the 
Cart Horse (Shire), and the Small White pig. Due to the 
greater rapidity of generation, his greatest success was found 
in his sheep. In 1785 he had as many as eighty rams leased to 
Sheep Breeders’ Associations in his awn and adjacent counties 
and received as high as 300 guineas for the use of these rams 
for a season. His most celebrated ram, Two Pounder, is reputed 
to have earned 800 pounds in one year. His wide flung develop- 
ment of the sire leasing system provided one of the chief forces 
of advancement for the later British breeds. 
His successes in his Longhorns were scarcely so pronounced 
although in an Oxfordshire sale in 1791, several bulls of his 
