Felbrigg Hall was owned by the Windhams and their successors, who are represented here in an extensive line of family portraits by artists such as Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller. It was saved and bequeathed by Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer (1906–1969), biographer of Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, and writer of 'Felbrigg: The Story of a House'.

Many of the acquisitions were made by William Windham II (1717–1761), after his Grand Tour between 1738 and 1742. These still hang in the cabinet and drawing room as he intended, and include the marines by Willem van de Velde of the Battle of the Texel, facing Samuel Scott’s two views of the Thames, and the many flower pieces and genre pictures. Despite the bankruptcy of William Frederick Windham or 'Mad Windham' as he became known in the 1860s, the subsequent sale of the house in 1863 to John Ketton, a Norwich merchant, and the negligence of his son Robert Ketton in the early twentieth century, little of importance was lost.