Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple)

"Liberty Leading the People" is probably Eugène Delacroix's best known painting.
It's painted on 28 July 1830, to commemorate the July Revolution that had just brought Louis-Philippe to the French throne.

click on the image to enlarge

It is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolour representing liberty and freedom. Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke the romantic image of the spirit of liberty. The soldiers lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, who is illuminated triumphantly, as if in a spotlight.
It shows the allegorical figure of Liberty as a half-draped woman wearing the traditional Phrygian cap of liberty and holding a gun in one hand and the tricolor in the other. It is strikingly realistic; Delacroix, the young man in the painting wearing the opera hat, was present on the barricades in July 1830. Allegory helps achieve universality in the painting: Liberty is not a woman; she is an abstract force.

The French government bought the painting but officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view.
The boy holding a gun up on the right is sometimes thought to be an inspiration of the Gavroche character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel.

It's said to be Delacroix's most influential work, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style.
Well, it's definitely one of my favorites!