Mr. Thomas attended Yale University, a campus that was rebuilt in a gothic-revival style in the 1930s, for both his undergraduate years and for law school.

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He dropped his fledgling career as a cabinetmaker years ago, a symptom of moving to New York and leaving his shop behind, his dexterity now devoted to chainsawing on weekends at the gothic-revival cottage near Newburgh that he shares with his wife Fenella, a physician.

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Inspired by the religious sobriety of the early-19th-century German painters who called themselves "Nazarenes, " by England's Gothic-revival movement and by the straightforward imagery of early-Renaissance painters like Giotto, they looked to the Bible, to the poetry of Keats and Tennyson and to Shakespeare for subject matter, proclaiming their intention to shun vulgar or sentimental subjects and to paint directly from nature.

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In 1991 he moved to San Francisco, where he bought a 1913 Willis Polk-designed Gothic revival home that needed a full renovation.

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