Copying formed a large part of an artist's training. In this chapter, a selection of the vast variety of copied subjects that find their way into trade union emblems is examined. Emblem designers cast their net wide, copying from Renaissance artists such as Raphael to artists of their own era such as Lord Leighton, from portraits and from sculpture. The influence of high art is very much apparent in the emblems, but was the reverse possible? Could the art of the unions, perhaps, have even exercised an influence on high art itself?

The emblem commemorating the opening in 1830 of the Steam Engine Makers' Society, Rochdale Branch No. 3 (Plate 84), features a sculptural edifice with James Watt seated at the top. At the centre of the peak of the emblem, in what might even be a sacred monstrance or reliquary, is the hive of industry, flanked by the date 1854, whilst the certificate itself refers to the date of the establishment of the society as 2 November 1824. The emblem is difficult to date, but stylistically it is probably no earlier than the mid 1860s.

Within an arched niche in this Gothic, stone-coloured framework, James Watt is seated on a tiered, white marble socle in a triangular format with four allegorical women in attendance who hold pens and books (embodiments of the design process).