Neoclassical Art is a severe and unemotional form of art harkening back to the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome. Its rigidity was a reaction to the overbred Rococo style and the emotional charged Baroque style. The rise of Neoclassical Art was part of a general revival of interest in classical thought, which was of some importance in the American and French revolutions.
Important Neoclassicists include the architects Robert Smirke and Robert Adam, the sculptors Antonio Canova,Jean-Antoine Houdon and Bertel Thorvaldsen, and painters J.A.D. Ingres, Jacques-Louis David and Anton Raphael Mengs.Around 1800, Romanticism emerged as a reaction against Neoclassicism. It did not really replace the Neoclassical style so much as act as a counterbalancing influence, and many artists were influenced by both styles to a certain degree.Neoclassical Art was also a primary influence on 19th-century Academic Art