The Only Use of

patriarch
in
Washington Black

And then I glimpsed him, a man rising from the shadows: like a figure from myth, the great patriarch of the Wildes, Fellow of the Royal Society, recipient of the Copley Medal and the Bakerian lectureship, the man whose learning had kindled his son's mind and never burned down, the man who had drawn us north through icefield and hazard, against what odds, oh, that man, whose very treatise on the icy nature of comets once left the Sorbonne in chaos, whose learning could be expressed in twelve languages, who admired the jokes of the Tartars and the salads of the Inca, who had instructed his three-year-old son to scoop when his hand held a knife and to cut when it held a spoon, for no person oug†
p. 182.0

Definitions:

(1) (patriarch)
a usually elderly man who is the leader of a group such as a family or tribe
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus