"This book shows how and why the painted domestic interior, with figures positioned in provocative, and even disturbing, manners figured so prominently in contemporary visual culture. In these expressive images, the notion and limits of identity were debated rather than resolved. Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting begins in the 1840s and examines the new ways of imagining and describing interior spaces. It ends in the years around World War I, when the devastations of the war left countless people with their private interiors either nakedly exposed or totally destroyed. Wide-ranging analyses of key individual works, including Edgar Degas's Interior, John Singer Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Edouard Vuillard's Mother and Sister of the Artist, and Walter Sickert's Ennui form the core of this study."--Jacket.