Actress Elizabeth Taylor has won the legal battle over a Vincent van Gogh painting in her possession, with the US Supreme Court refusing to reconsider the suit filed by four persons who claim that the artwork belongs to one of their Jewish ancestors.
Washington, October 30 : Actress Elizabeth Taylor has won the legal battle over a Vincent van Gogh painting in her possession, with the US Supreme Court refusing to reconsider the suit filed by four persons who claim that the artwork belongs to one of their Jewish ancestors.
In their plaint, the four persons claimed that their ancestor, Margarete Mauthner, was forced to sell the painting to her oppressors before fleeing Nazi Germany for South Africa in 1939.
Taylor's lawyers contended that the artwork 'View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy', painted less than a year before van Gough's suicide, did not pass through Nazi hands.
The two-time Oscar winner said that the nearly 15 million-dollar painting was purchased by a Jewish collector living in Argentina, who had escaped Nazi tyranny in 1933.
According to E!online, Taylor's father bought the painting for her at a Sotheby's auction in London in 1963.
In the suit filed in October 2004, the four relatives of Mauthner alleged that the actress and her father had been "negligent and careless" for not thoroughly investigating the painting's provenance.
US District Judge Gary Kausner, however, ruled in 2005 that Mauthner's descendants had waited too long to file suit and therefore had not stated a valid ownership claim.
ANI
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