As an important carrier of traditional Chinese culture, China's collection of paintings and cultural relics is the key support for our firm cultural confidence. Considering the transmission of the value of paintings and cultural relics, museum lighting not only needs to consider the protection of cultural relics, but also to enhance the visual experience of the audience, especially the perception of the preference of paintings under different lighting conditions. This study simulated the real light environment of the museum in the experimental chamber of Tianjin University, and selected representative cold-tone, warm-tone and neutral-tone paintings as the experimental objects according to the characteristics of the paintings in the Chinese collection, and set the lighting conditions in terms of the environmental illuminance E, the fidelity of the light source Rf, and the saturation of the light source Rg, and selected 30 observers to obtain the preference scores of paintings of different colours under different lighting conditions through the subjective evaluation experiments. The results showed that increasing the ambient illuminance was favourable to the painting of different hues under different lighting conditions. The results show that increasing the ambient illuminance is conducive to increasing the observers' preference for the three kinds of paintings; for warm and cool paintings, when the ambient illuminance is low, the preference for paintings increases with the increase of Rf value. Conversely, the two were negatively correlated. The preference for mid-tone paintings decreased with increasing Rf for all three lighting conditions; in contrast, Rg had the lowest effect on observer preference. Through multiple linear regression analysis, a preference calculation model for paintings with different colour tones was established, the preference scores of Chinese paintings were predicted based on three lighting parameters. The model provides a basis for optimising the lighting design of paintings and cultural relics in the museum.