Reinhart met Schiller as a young man: they became lifelong friends. In Rome, he befriended Thorvaldsen, Koch and Carstens, mainstays of the expatriate artist community. Reinhart is thought to have been responsible for mockingly giving the group of artists known as the Nazarenes their name: unlike his friend Koch, he did not dally with them. Koch and he together developed a heroic mode of landscape painting.