All museums engage in preventative conservation to insure the longevity of their collections for future generations. One aspect is lighting where there can be a tradeoff between light damage and color appearance. A second aspect is imaging where excessive light exposure reduces accessibility and where digital surrogates increase collection access and reduce handling by maintaining fragile objects in storage. Color fidelity is a critical quality criterion for both aspects. A color target was formulated for museum applications using the absorption and scattering properties of artist acrylic dispersion paints and retouching paints representative of historical and modern paintings. One component of the target was 12 samples varying systematically in CIELAB hue at the maximum achievable chroma. A Euclidean color-difference space based on CIE94 was used to determine chromatic gamut area as a measure of color preference and clarity while color differences weighting hue were a measure of color distortion. Four grays were formulated with a range of color inconstancy under Illuminant A while matching under D65 and four metameric pairs were formulated to represent examples of restorative inpainting with poor pigment selection with respect to metamerism. These samples were very sensitive to changes in spectral power distribution and spectral sensitivity. The target, at this stage only computational, was tested for museum lighting and imaging applications, the results indicative of superior performance to conventional color targets.