← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Jacques-Louis David7 decades - 2
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun1 decades - 3
Marie Tussaud0 decades - 4
Jean-Honoré Fragonard6 decades - 5
Philippe II, Duke of Orléansnot measured- - 6
François Boucher21 decades - 7
Louis-Alexandre Berthier1 decades - 8
Jean-Antoine Watteau18 decades - 9
Jean-Baptiste Greuze4 decades - 10
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin0 decades - 11
Vivant Denon22 decades - 12
Maurice Quentin de La Tournot measured- - 13
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard1 decades - 14
Hubert Robert18 decades - 15
Joseph Ducreux0 decades - 16
Jean-Antoine Houdon3 decades - 17
Jean-Marc Nattier2 decades - 18
Louis-Léopold Boilly2 decades - 19
Guillaume Thomas François Raynal3 decades - 20
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis0 decades - 21
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon3 decades - 22
Jean-Baptiste Pigalle3 decades - 23
Jean-Baptiste Oudry6 decades - 24
Françoise de Graffigny2 decades - 25
Étienne Maurice Falconet0 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.