← 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
Jean-Baptiste Kléber0 decades
- 2
Robert Adam22 decades - 3
Lancelot Brown2 decades - 4
John Nash22 decades - 5
Thomas Chippendale11 decades - 6
Filippo Juvarra12 decades - 7
Pierre Charles L’Enfant0 decades - 8
Luigi Vanvitelli22 decades - 9
John Soane22 decades - 10
Étienne-Louis Boullée0 decades - 11
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli3 decades - 12
Claude Nicolas Ledoux5 decades - 13
James Hoban8 decades - 14
Benjamin Henry Latrobe7 decades - 15
Jacques-Germain Soufflot1 decades - 16
Ange-Jacques Gabriel9 decades - 17
Andrey Voronikhin6 decades - 18
Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff5 decades - 19
Carl Gotthard Langhans6 decades - 20
Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt7 decades - 21
William Chambers22 decades - 22
Matvey Kazakov6 decades - 23
Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlingtonnot measured- - 24
Ventura Rodríguez22 decades
- 25
James Gibbs22 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.