Ulreich started painting Western subjects as a boy, inspired by the scenes created by Charles Russell and Frederick Remington and published in popular magazines of the day. Ulreich painted Western scenes throughout the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting these themes in many of the murals he created for public buildings in the U.S. and Europe. While these Western scenes are among the most representational of his works, they remain modernist in spirit, exhibiting relatively flat imagery with hard outlines and bold, imaginative colors.