Elizabeth Taylor gets to keep Vincent Van Gogh painting

An US appeals court has decided in favour of actress Dame Elizabeth Taylor, who was entangled in a legal battle with a Jewish family over the possession of a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

The three-judge panel ruled on Friday that the Orkin family, which claimed that the Nazis had stolen the original painting from them, waited too long to move the court for its return.

While suing Taylor in 2004, the family contended that Nazi soldiers had illegally seized the painter's 1889 piece View of the Asylum Chapel at Saint-Remy from their aunt's home, during the holocaust.

They demanded that the valuable artwork be returned to them under the 1998 U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

Earlier, a lower court had also ruled that the Orkins waited too long to claim the painting, which Taylor bought at a London auction in 1963.

Upholding the lower court's ruling, the appeals court said that the family must have come to know about the whereabouts of the painting through its high-profile purchase, and a subsequent international auction in 1990, and they should have acted quicker.

"It is apparent that Ms Taylor's acquisition of the painting was certainly discoverable at least by 1990," Contactmusic quoted Judge Sidney Thomas, one of the three judges on the court panel, as saying.