The estate of the copper heiress Huguette Clark has lost a battle to recover more than worth of donations, including an Edouard Manet painting, that she gave the Manhattan hospital where she lived the last two decades of her life. A Manhattan Surrogate Court judge, Nora S. Anderson, ruled last week that the statute of limitations had expired the estate to argue that officials at the hospital, Beth Israel Medical Center, had manipulated Ms. Clark into donating. We are gratified by the dismissal of the meritless against the hospital, said Marvin Wexler, the lawyer the hospital, which has been renamed Mount Sinai Beth Israel after merging with Mount Sinai Health System. Ms. Clark, who died at in May , had no close relatives. The lawsuit was brought by New York City s public ministrator, which controls the estate, and lawyers it. The ruling is the latest twist in a long running conflict over Ms. Clark s nine figure estate. Her father, Senator William A. Clark of Montana, made his fortune with copper mines in his state and real estate s in Las Vegas. She was his youngest daughter. She spent the last years of her life at the hospital, with round the clock private nursing, after she recovered skin cancer, rather than returning to her Fifth Avenue apartment or her sprawling s in California and Connecticut. While Judge Anderson dismissed the estate s against the hospital, she said last week that a separate lawsuit could proceed against two physicians and a nurse who took care of Ms. Clark in her declining years and received about . in s her. The judge said she had been presented with two starkly different accounts of Ms. Clark s mental state in her dot . In court papers, the city s public ministrator portrayed Ms. Clark as weak minded woman who suffered mental illness and was easily influenced to write s. But her doctors and hospital officials have asserted she was mentally sharp and intelligent and capable of deciding what to do with her . They note she refused at ast four requests large donations hospital ministrators, including as late as . When she arrived at Beth Israel Medical Center, she needed hospitalization and received excellent care, said Gregory Williams, a hospital spokesman, in an email. She was subsequently cleared discharge, but refused to and stayed of her own volition. Beth Israel s practice was not to forcefully a patient the hospital who refused to . Judge Anderson said the against the physicians and nurse was needed to settle the sharp factual dispute between the parties. She wrote that the of the lawsuit would turn on whether or not the decedent possessed the higher vel of mental capacity to support the ability to valid s. She ded that these disputes cannot be resolved on papers. After Ms. Clark s death, a bitter feud arose over her estate. She made two wills within six weeks. One ft most of the to distant relatives, and the second cut out her relatives and made bequests to arts foundations, the hospital and people around her, including her doctors and nurses. Ms. Clark donated , to the hospital between and , giving large s nearly every year in response to requests hospital ministrators. In , she transferred to the hospital Edouard Manet s Pivoines dans une bouteille, which later sold at auction . . That suit was settled out of court on the eve of in September , creating a new arts foundation, donating to the hospital and aving to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, where her father s fills a g. Ms. Clark s distant relatives received about . after taxes. The settlement allowed the estate to pursue the to recover s she made outside the will. However, Judge Anderson said last week that the law required the to have been made within three years of the last donation, in October . This is sort of like a belt and suspenders approach Novo Nordisk, he said. | 
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