In the works which Wilkie produced in his final period he exchanged the detailed handling, the delicate finish and the reticent hues of his earlier works for a style distinguished by breadth of touch, largeness of effect, richness of tone and full force of melting and powerful colour. His subjects, too, were no longer the homely things of the genre-painter: with his broader method he attempted the portrayal of scenes from history, suggested for the most part by the associations of his foreign travel. His change of style and change of subject were severely criticized at the time; to some extent he lost his hold upon the public, who regretted the familiar subjects and the interest and pathos of his earlier productions, and were less ready to follow him into the historic scenes towards which this final phase of his art sought to lead them. The popular verdict had in it a basis of truth: Wilkie was indeed greatest as a genre-painter. But on technical grounds his change of style was criticized with undue severity. While his later works are admittedly more frequently faulty in form and draftsmanship than those of his earlier period, some of them at least ("The Bride at her Toilet", 1838, for instance) show a true gain and development in power of handling, and in mastery over complex and forcible colour harmonies. Most of Wilkie's foreign subjects – the "Pifferari", "Princess Doria", the "Maid of Saragossa", the "Spanish Podado", a "Guerilla Council of War", the "Guerilla Taking Leave of his Family" and the "Guerilla's Return to his Family" – passed into the English royal collection; but the dramatic "Two Spanish Monks of Toledo", also entitled the "Confessor Confessing", became the property of the Marquess of Lansdowne.