an Australian officer, Captain George Matson Nicholas, was posted to Étaples. He heard about the female Australian artist who had to leave her paintings behind when she and her family left abruptly for England. Nicholas sought her works and admired them, and decided to contact the artist when next he was on leave. He met Rix in September 1916, and they were married on 7 October at St Saviour's, Warwick Avenue in London. After three days together, he returned to duty; she was widowed five weeks later on 14 November, when he was shot and killed during battle at Flers, on the Western Front. Initially writing in her diary that she had lost the will to live, Rix Nicholas's grief eventually found its expression in three paintings, titled And Those Who Would Have Been Their Sons, They Gave Their Immortality (a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke), Desolation and Pro Humanitate. The second of these paintings (which was destroyed by fire in 1930), portrayed a gaunt and tearful woman shrouded in a black cloak, crouched staring at the viewer amidst a battlescarred landscape, featureless but for the crosses on distant graves. The National Gallery of Australia holds a charcoal drawing made as a study for the work. Desolation was "a portrait of a woman cradling a ghostly child". The reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of the painting: Desolation is almost gruesome in the grim delineation of the figure typifying all the widowed world in one lone woman. There she sits, lost in an awful reverie, over the stricken battlefield. The work is an epitome of wasteful ruin. Her triptych Pro Humanitate conveys the tragedy of her short marriage to Nicholas, but like Desolation, it was destroyed in a fire. The work comprised panels representing a happy couple in an outdoor vista; the moment of death of a soldier, arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose; and the grieving widow, watched by the ghost of the soldier. In visualising "the ruin caused by war", her works were more personal than those of other artists of the last years of World War I, such as Paul Nash and Eric Kennington, and her representation of widowhood was both unusual for its time, and confronting for the viewer. Return to Australia, 1918–1923 In March 1918, Rix Nicholas, along with her brother-in-law Athol Nicholas, left England and arrived in Melbourne on 10 May.