When displaying art, several criteria must he balanced when designing illumination including the artist's intention, damage, energy efficiency, viewing experience and understanding. and for commercial galleries and sales. The most common lighting for art includes natural daylight and incandescent spotlights. Neither source is optimal for all criteria; thus there is considerable interest in the use of white-light light-emitting diode (LED) lighting. A feasibility study was conducted to address two questions. First, was it possible to design a three-primary LED source that yielded the same color rendering as common museum lighting? Second, could one design the lighting to achieve specific color appearance attributes? Three-primary lights using a Gaussian function were optimized matching the chromaticity of D65 and minimizing color differences for a set of acrylic dispersion paints. The optimal wavelengths depended on bandwidth. Lights were also optimized that either maximized or minimized average chroma. A set of real LEDs was selected that produced similar results when evaluated computationally. A source that increases chroma may be useful when used to illuminate works of art with high light sensitivity: very low illuminances are necessary and such a source will compensate for the reduction of colorfulness and visual clarity. A source that decreases chroma may be used to render art in similar fashion to low-light conditions such as churches and caves. In general, white LED lighting is advantageous for art conservation because they do not emit UV and IR radiation and their visible radiation is reduced when compared with their continuous spectrum equivalent. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 36, 324-334, 2011; Published online 7 October 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20633