The U.S. Supreme Court allowed actress Elizabeth Taylor to keep a Vincent van Gogh painting yesterday, rejecting an appeal by descendants of a Jewish woman - one of whom, Andrew Orkin, lives in Ontario - who said she was forced to sell it before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.
Without comment, the justices refused to review a U.S. appeals court ruling that dismissed the lawsuit because the descendants waited too long to bring their claims demanding that Taylor return van Gogh's View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Rémy.
Taylor's father purchased the painting at auction in London in 1963 for £92,000 - about $257,000 (U.S.) at the time. The 1889 painting now is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Four South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman who fled Germany in 1939, sued Taylor in 2004.
The lawsuit claimed the Nazis forced Mauthner to sell the painting under duress. Taylor said the record showed the painting was sold through two Jewish art dealers to a Jewish art collector, and that there was no evidence of Nazi coercion or participation.
A U.S. appeals court upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit, at which point lawyers for the descendants appealed to the Supreme Court.