← 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
Francisco Goya18 decades - 2
Hokusai14 decades - 3
Jacques-Louis David7 decades - 4
William Hogarth22 decades - 5
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun1 decades - 6
Thomas Gainsborough18 decades - 7
Marie Tussaud0 decades - 8
Antonio Canova22 decades - 9
Jean-Honoré Fragonard6 decades - 10
Philippe II, Duke of Orléansnot measured- - 11
Joshua Reynolds22 decades - 12
Canaletto22 decades - 13
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo21 decades - 14
François Boucher21 decades - 15
Angelica Kauffman18 decades - 16
Giovanni Battista Piranesi9 decades - 17
Louis-Alexandre Berthier1 decades - 18
Henry Fuseli10 decades - 19
Kitagawa Utamaro0 decades - 20
Joseph Wright of Derby3 decades - 21
Jean-Antoine Watteau18 decades - 22
Jean-Baptiste Greuze4 decades - 23
John Singleton Copley21 decades - 24
John Trumbull22 decades - 25
Gilbert Stuart22 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.