At St. Vincent College, the students preparing for the priesthood studied Philosophy, Theology, Latin, Greek and History. English, German and French were offered to the young men as well. In addition, all of the enrolled youths were required to attend courses in drawing and painting. One German Benedictine Brother, who was ordained at St. Vincent in 1856, described the art courses in great detail. We learn from his reminiscences, written in his native language in 1873, that a nephew of Boniface Wimmer taught art with professional expertise. Lukas Wimmer had graduated from the Munich Royal Academy of Art before joining his uncle at St. Vincent.Several members of the newly founded North American Benedictine community were actually sent to the Bavarian Academy to pursue further studies in painting or sculpture.[26]
For the students in Pennsylvania, their art studies were aided by a formidable collection of art works that were sent to the college from Munich. With assistance from Father Joseph Mueller, court chaplain of King Ludwig I and business manager of the Ludwig-Missionsverein, over three hundred paintings arrived at the college between the years 1852 and 1859. The majority of the canvases originated from the collection of Father Pius Reiser, who had been a seminary classmate of Boniface Wimmer, and later a convent chaplain and canon at the Munich cathedral. The principal content of the paintings was religious. Some of the canvases were painted by Benedictine monks. It is likely that they had been confiscated from monasteries suppressed in Germany during the Napoleonic wars. Secular princes recovered most of the monastic art, and King Ludwig's Museum, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, is said to have received over 10,000 paintings. The museum kept the better works and sold the remaining canvases to several European art establishments.When Boniface Wimmer wrote to King Ludwig in 1849 for donations of art through the Ludwig-Missionsverein, Pius Reiser and Joseph Mueller may possibly have obtained a remnant of this collection of monastic art for St. Vincent.[27] In gratitude for the paintings they received at their new college, the monks at St. Vincent said 1200 masses. This was not an unusual arrangement at that time.[28] Only 197 of the original 300 paintings sent from Bavaria are still at St. Vincent. The 1986 exhibit "Gifts of a King, the treasured art of St. Vincent Archabbey" featured 29 paintings, a set of vestments, a monstrance, and several letters from King Ludwig. Brother Nathan Cochran O.S.B. was the show's curator. It has become the permanent King Ludwig Gallery at St. Vincent and displays German landscapes and battle scenes, a few French landscapes and still-lives, two portraits of King Ludwig, some 19th century copies of Italian and Spanish canvases, and above all Old and New Testament scenes. The majority of the 300 paintings, sent to Wimmer in mid-century, were created by minor seventeenth and eighteenth century artists. However, for the German-American missionary at St. Vincent they represented an important part of German culture and a valuable teaching tool. Indeed his art center attracted many aspiring artists as well as the German-American church artists on their visits to St. Vincent.There they had an opportunity to steep themselves in the Western European tradition, which they had left behind.[29]
In 1855 Pope Pius
IX elevated Saint Vincent monastery to an Abbey and named Boniface Wimmer
Abbot for life. He died in 1887. In 1892 Saint Vincent was declared an
Archabbey and Wimmer an Archabbot posthumously. In the same year the
cornerstone of the Archabbey Basilica was laid.[30] Today it stands in
great
splendor with a statue of Boniface Wimmer at the entrance
portal. (Figure 4, St. Vincent Archabbey.)
St. Vincent College is no longer limited to the training of Catholic priests. It now functions as a coeducational liberal arts college where 35% of the faculty is Benedictine. It offers undergraduate degrees in a great many disciplines. The visual arts are prominently represented in the curriculum.
King Ludwig I of Bavaria had to abdicate in favor of his son Maximilian II in 1848. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life in Rome and remained in close touch with the German Catholic missions in North America that were generously supported by the Ludwig-Missionsverein until 1918.[31]