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Rinehart, the son of a Carroll County farmer, enrolled at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. Later, he found employment at a local marble yard carving fireplace mantles. In 1855, Rinehart visited Italy for the first time, and then returned briefly to Baltimore to open a studio. With the financial backing of his life-long friend and patron William T. Walters, Rinehard returned to Italy and and opened a studio in Rome, where he could draw on the skill of Italian marble carvers. He spent the rest of his life in Rome.This bust of Walters was commissioned from Rinehart's Roman studio in 1867. Walters began the collection of art that became the Walters Art Museum. Walters made his fortune by dealing in rye whiskey, initially, then in railroads and banking after the Civil War. Twenty years after Rinehart created this bust, Walters commissioned him to make a statue of Roger B. Taney, former chief justice of the Supreme Court. Taney delivered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled against federal regulation of slavery and maintained that Black Americans, free or enslaved, could not be citizens. The statue was a gift to the City of Baltimore and was erected in Mount Vernon Place in 1887. It was removed in 2017 along with three other Confederate monuments in Baltimore.