The article presents how the image of a state and municipal employee, reflected in the Russian legislation of the 18th and 21st centuries has changed over the course of years. The article distinguishes main groups of characteristics in historical and modern images: professional and moral and ethical ones. The image of an official of the 21st century includes the semes ‘educated’, ‘experienced’, ‘diligent’, ‘objective’, ‘law-abiding’, ‘fair’, ‘decent’, ‘honest’, ‘benevolent’, ‘polite’ and ‘caring’. The image of an official in the legislation of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great contains the semes 'experienced', 'intelligent', 'reasonable', 'obedient', 'loyal', 'diligent', 'hard-working', 'law-abiding', 'fair', 'honest' , 'conscientious', 'decent', 'modest', 'philanthropic', 'benevolent', 'compassionate', 'polite' and 'selfless'. In the 21st century a number of professional characteristics of an employee has decreased by four times, whereas the number of moral and ethical characteristics has hardly changed. However, most of the historical nominations have been lost. There is a replacement of the former synonymic rows, hyponymic groups with modern generalizing words, including those of foreign origin, so the old semantic accents have practically not been preserved. The historical image of an employee is more expressive, personally oriented, close to the image of an ordinary respectable person. A modern image of an employee is more abstract and stereotypical. While maintaining a moral and ethical orientation of the reference image of an employee in the 21st century ethno-cultural constants “conscience”, “truth”, “justice”, “goodness” and “obedience” have lost their dominant positions. The purposefulness of speech modeling of the “official portrait” of an employee brings together the 18th and the 21st centuries. The Soviet era can be considered a break in the tradition of building and maintaining the reputation of state and municipal employees.