Liz Taylor can keep Van Gogh 'looted by the Nazis'

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Dame Elizabeth, 75, bought the 1889 work, View Of The Asylum And Chapel At Saint-Remy, at Sotheby's in 1963 for £92,000. She keeps it in her Los Angeles home.

The painting, completed by Van Gogh near the end of his life, is estimated to now be worth up to £8 million.

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£8m winner: Liz Taylor can keep her masterpiece

The Orkin family sued Taylor for return of the painting in 2004.

They are South African and Canadian descendants of Margarete Mauthner, a Jewish woman whose possessions were seized by the Nazis when she fled Germany in 1939.

The Orkins claimed the work was among the items confiscated and that it should be returned to them under the U.S. Holocaust Victims Redress Act.

But Taylor said she was the rightful owner and that the work had passed through two Jewish art dealers without any sign of Nazi coercion before she bought it.

On Friday, the U.S. appeal court backed an earlier ruling that the Orkins had waited too long to claim the painting.

"It is apparent that Taylor's acquisition of the painting was certainly discoverable at least by 1990, when she held it out for sale in an international auction, and most probably as early as 1963, when she acquired it in a highly publicised international auction," said Judge Sidney Thomas.

Any claim to the painting, Thomas added, "expired in or before 1993, three years after the last public announcement of Taylor's ownership".

A spokesman for the actress was not available for comment.