Charles Frederick Ulrich was a noted late nineteenth-century realist painter of portraits and genre scenes who spent much of his life as an expatriate in Europe. He was born in New York, the son of a German émigré photographer and painter. In the early 1870s, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design and may have attended classes at the Cooper Union School of Art. He attended the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany. He was discovered by Thomas B. Clarke, a lace and linen manufacturer in New York who became a collector of contemporary American art.