Liz Taylor Keeps Van Gogh Despite Jewish Family's Claims

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed actress Elizabeth Taylor to keep a Vincent van Gogh painting this morning, rejecting an appeal by descendants of a Jewish woman who said she was forced to sell "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, according to Reuters.

Four South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman who fled Germany in 1939 for South Africa, sued Taylor in 2004 in federal court in California.

The lawsuit claimed the Nazis forced Mauthner to sell the painting under duress before fleeing Germany and that it should be returned to her descendants under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

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 any Nazi coercion or participation in the transactions.

A U.S. appeals court upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit.