By David Masello

As a stranger to a new city, Jen Tullock was immediately welcomed by a fellow stranger. The man who greeted her was French, tall, wearing a classic beret, and draped in layers of capes. The moment Tullock, then an aspiring actress and now an accomplished one, saw the man, he beckoned, staring straight at her with a hand outstretched. The figure is the subject of Edouard Manet’s “Beggar with a Duffle Coat,” which hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC).

“The painting is situated at the top of a grand staircase in a move that feels intentional, as the outstretched arm, to me, acts as a welcoming gesture,” says Tullock, who, when she first encountered the canvas in 2006, was beginning an internship at the AIC. She recalls that first morning when she came through the loading dock into the empty museum and saw the figure.

“I found great comfort in this piece at a time when I felt afloat, compelled by very little, worried about money,” she recalls, echoing the existential laments of many a young actress. In Tullock’s case, however, she has become a star — appearing on Apple TV’s Severance and HBO’s Perry Mason, as well as in numerous films and plays. Her one-woman play, Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God, premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City.

Just as Tullock was feeling like an outsider in Chicago, working at an august institution where she felt “totally out of place and without the qualifications to be there,” so, too, is Manet’s figure an outsider. Manet was born to an upper-middle-class French family, but he was infused with an empathy for Paris’s beggars and others who had been pushed out of the city as the capital expanded and prospered under Baron Haussmann’s urban redevelopment plan.

“Something about the way he is positioned, standing, not kneeling,” says Tullock, “gives him a regality. There’s a kindness in his eyes. This is a completely compassionate perspective of the man. I was 22 when I took that position at the Art Institute, and I developed a kind of paternal fascination with him.”

Although Tullock was convinced she would work at the museum for about three weeks, she stayed for two years, working simultaneously as an actress in Chicago theaters and improv clubs. She had come to Chicago from a small college in Decatur, Illinois, hoping to become “a giant actress.” As she recalls, “I was so appallingly destitute that for a while I was living off peanut M&Ms since there were bowls of them available for the interns.” She moved to New York City in 2008.

Tullock discovered on that first day at the AIC that interns had an hour in the morning, before training and work tasks, to wander the galleries. “We could walk the whole of the museum before the public entered. Every morning, I would put in my Discman a CD of the French pianist Pascale Rogé playing Erik Satie, and as I listened, I would stare at this Manet. I found a lot of comfort in that daily routine.” Tullock recalls working in many AIC departments, among them the Women’s Auxiliary Board and the Visiting Artist Program. She was fired from the latter for being late to pick up the painter Elizabeth Peyton at the airport. “The irony now is that Peyton lives just a few blocks from me in New York.”

Tullock credits her grandmother for her first exposure to art, when she saw works at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum. “I suppose I looked most at Alice Neel, and over the years at Susan Rothenberg, Chuck Close, and all the other artists that a self-indulgent art student takes to.”

Tullock has found her place in the world as an adult and is recognized by countless people for her roles on screen and stage. “There is a kindness in Manet’s portraiture that I have always appreciated, and it’s showcased beautifully here. This is one of his most compassionate and humane depictions.”

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Story prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Fine Art Today