← 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 - 26
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin0 decades - 27
Vivant Denon22 decades - 28
Benjamin West22 decades - 29
Anton Raphael Mengs18 decades - 30
George Stubbs13 decades - 31
Bernardo Bellotto13 decades - 32
Joseph Vernet22 decades - 33
James Gillray7 decades - 34
Giovanni Paolo Panini7 decades - 35
Ulrika Eleonora, Queen of Sweden0 decades - 36
Maurice Quentin de La Tournot measured- - 37
Rosalba Carriera22 decades - 38
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard1 decades - 39
Charles Willson Peale13 decades - 40
George Romney20 decades - 41
Hubert Robert18 decades - 42
Giuseppe Castiglione17 decades - 43
Pompeo Batoni20 decades - 44
Thomas Rowlandson15 decades - 45
Joseph Ducreux0 decades - 46
Sharakunot measured- - 47
Johann Gottfried Schadow9 decades - 48
Jean-Étienne Liotard0 decades - 49
Francesco Guardi21 decades - 50
Jean-Antoine Houdon3 decades - 51
William Kent22 decades - 52
Suzuki Harunobu0 decades - 53
Jean-Marc Nattier2 decades - 54
Vladimir Borovikovsky4 decades - 55
Louis-Léopold Boilly2 decades - 56
Guillaume Thomas François Raynal3 decades - 57
Johann Zoffany0 decades - 58
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis0 decades - 59
Alexander Roslin0 decades - 60
Dmitry Levitzky4 decades - 61
John André4 decades - 62
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein7 decades - 63
Anton Graff17 decades - 64
Allan Ramsay22 decades - 65
Henry Raeburn14 decades - 66
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon3 decades - 67
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt5 decades - 68
Pietro Longhi22 decades - 69
Jean-Baptiste Pigalle3 decades - 70
Aleijadinho8 decades - 71
Jean-Baptiste Oudry6 decades - 72
John Flaxman Jr.not measured- - 73
William Beechey13 decades - 74
Françoise de Graffigny2 decades - 75
Giambattista Bodoni22 decades - 76
Étienne Maurice Falconet0 decades - 77
Mary Delany0 decades - 78
Louis-Michel van Loo0 decades - 79
Charles André van Loonot measured- - 80
Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Coswaynot measured- - 81
Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki18 decades - 82
Elizabeth Montagu12 decades - 83
Claudine Guérin de Tencin0 decades - 84
Sophie de Condorcet3 decades - 85
Nicolas-Jacques Conté0 decades - 86
Mary Moser1 decades - 87
Andrea Appiani22 decades - 88
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo16 decades - 89
Marguerite Gérard9 decades - 90
Carle Vernet22 decades - 91
Jean-Baptiste Regnault1 decades - 92
Nicolai Abildgaard0 decades - 93
Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrinnot measured- - 94
Toriyama Sekien0 decades - 95
Joseph-Marie Vien3 decades - 96
Jan van Huysum0 decades - 97
Karoline Luise of Hesse-Darmstadtnot measured- - 98
Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffandnot measured- - 99
François-André Vincent3 decades - 100
Anne Vallayer-Coster1 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.