Charles Ulrich began his formal artistic education at the National Academy of Design, enrolling in the antique class in 1873. In the 1874-75 school season he was in both the antique and life classes. He also may have studied at the Cooper Union during this time. He continued his training at the Royal Academy in Munich, studying under Ludwig von Löfftz and Wilhelm Lindenschmidt.
He returned to New York sometime between 1879 and 1882, probably in the latter year, when he first exhibited in an Academy annual exhibition. His highly detailed genre subjects, generally featuring workshop laborers of the Industrial Revolution, received considerable-and mainly favorable-critical attention; the major collectors Thomas B. Clarke and William T. Evans acquired his paintings even before they appeared in public exhibitions. In 1884 his unidealized image of immigrants arriving in New York, In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden (1884, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), won the Academy's Thomas B. Clarke Prize the first time it was awarded. Ulrich continued exhibiting with the Academy and occasionally with the Society of American Artists through the spring of 1885. Later that year he returned permanently to Europe.
After a brief visit to Holland, Ulrich settled in Venice. His last contribution to an Academy annual exhibition, in 1887, was a Venetian subject. By the early 1890s he was again in Munich, where he helped organize the American art section of the Munich International Exposition of 1892. He made his only documented return to the United States that year. He spent the rest of his career in Europe, working in Rome and Berlin and exhibiting widely. He participated in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and, after that, in the various Secession exhibitions. Until recently, only about a half dozen of his works were known.
Duveneck was in Europe when, in 1883-84, Ulrich needed a portrait to present to the Academy to confirm his election as Associate. However, in the late 1870s, Duveneck was a well-known, popular teacher, especially receptive to younger American students and frequently in Munich. Ulrich was seventeen when he arrived to study in the German city. It is likely that this work was an informal memento of the artists' acquaintance, executed in Munich in about 1876.