Liz Taylor wins court battle to keep Van Gogh painting

A US appeals court has backed the dismissal of a lawsuit demanding that Dame Elizabeth Taylor turn over a Vincent van Gogh painting once confiscated by Nazis.

Four descendants of the late Margarete Mauthner, whose possessions were seized by the Nazis after she fled Germany in 1939, claimed in a 2004 lawsuit that Dame Elizabeth failed to review the ownership history of View of the Asylum of Saint-Remy before acquiring the painting more than 40 years ago.

The heirs contended a sales brochure warned the painting was likely to have been confiscated by Nazis.

They asked for restitution and for the painting, which was valued at between £5m (€7.3m) and £7.5m (€11m) when it hung in Dame Elizabeth’s living room about two years ago.

But the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a lower federal court properly ruled in 2005 that the statute of limitations had expired for the state law under which the family filed its claim.

The lower court also correctly ruled that the Holocaust Victims Redress Act did not establish a right to sue for the return of confiscated property, the appeals court said.