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Weeks was born and raised in and around Boston. In the early 1870’s however, he travelled to Syria, Palestine and Egypt. This trip apparently proved the turning point in Weeks' career as it revealed to him the field in which his genius could find its most natural expression. He decided to pursue his artistic education in Paris and in 1874 he was registered in the atelier of the most celebrated French Orientalist, Jean Léon Gérôme.
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Weeks visited Morocco in the late 1870’s and exhibited the products of his tour in Philadelphia (1876 ‘An Arab Story Teller’), the Paris Salon, (1878 ‘A Moroccan Camel Driver, Tangier’) and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In these paintings the figures were generally placed against a backdrop of recognisable architectural monuments. In 1881, however, Weeks submitted a single, strikingly sparse Moroccan composition to the Paris Salon, entitled “Camels beside a Cistern”, which is now in the Forbes Magazines Collection.
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In 1882 Weeks travelled to northern India in search of new subjects. He toured for a year before returning to Europe and from 1884 to 1890 regularly exhibited Indian scenes at the Paris Salon. In July 1892 he set out on a second extended journey to India, this time through Turkey and Persia. He recorded his impressions of this journey in a series of illustrated articles for ‘Harper’s New Monthly Magazine’ between 1893 and 1895. Some of these were later worked up into paintings for an exhibition at the Salon. Further magazine and book illustrations followed and Weeks was kept busy with these and still more Salon pictures until his death in 1903.
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