ABSTRACT
Art therapy with older people as a specific client group appears to have emerged a little later than other areas of art therapy practice. Moreover art therapy with the elderly has remained less visible in general within the profession than with younger patients until more recent years. There is, for instance, much more literature on art therapy with adults and children. This is partly due to the channels that art therapy developed, which are clearly outlined in Waller’s (1991) book Becoming a profession, the history of art therapy in Britain 1940–1982. The first art therapy research conference per se was in 1949. Waller wrote that the need for research was: ‘essential if the art therapy movement is to continue and flourish both in theory and practice, as a radical form of psychotherapy’.
