Like a solvent, American culture, especially American television, has been melting the thick patina of traditional French style.

Dogon sculpture recreates the hermaphroditic silhouettes of the Tellem, featuring raised arms and a thick patina made of blood and millet beer.

Recent restoration, which removed a thick black patina added to tone down the statue to suit 19th-century taste, revealed a gold clasp.

The plain wood figures are followed by ones whose surfaces have been altered in some way, like a Baule monkey figure with a thick patina of sacrificial materials.

And like any objet d'art pressed into continual service for a century, "Beauty" has suffered, its fabled brilliance clouded by a thick patina of tradition.

A thick patina of dust lay over everything except the car.

Unable to secure his own interview, Mr. Thomas decided to collect what is known, reinterpret it and layer it with a thick patina of his own Freudian world view.

He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table.

And . . .' He brushed a thick patina of dust from the last cover and revealed a spectral figure poised menacingly above a sleeping damsel.

These carvings were pecked into the rock with stone tools and are covered with a thick patina that yields their age.