Thomas Weston was an assistant to the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, and lived and worked as an indentured servant to him at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, for seven years from February 1699 to February 1706, though he only left in May and appears to have married Esther Brockhurst at St Sepulcre's, London, on 4 June that year. He is depicted as a young man with Flamsteed in the south-east corner of the ceiling in the Painted Hall, was a good draughtsman and in this role helped Flamsteed with his 'Atlas Coelestis'. From at least 1712 he had a school, Weston’s Academy in a house called Heyton Hall (earlier Copped Hall) on what is now King William Walk (previously King Street) Greenwich, which from 1715 included ten pupils who were poor seamen's sons housed and educated by Greenwich Hospital. As numbers grew Weston's school became the basis of the Greenwich (now Royal) Hospital School and also, through division, first Burney's Academy in Greenwich and its successor after a move to Portsmouth, the Royal Naval Academy there. All of these had a mathematical core, training boys for sea and military service (the young Major-General James Wolfe, who lived in Greenwich as a boy, was a Weston pupil for example). The Revd Thomas Plume (who was vicar of Greenwich from 1658) in about 1702 had considered Weston as a possible candidate for the Plumian Chair of Astronomy that he was planning to establish by bequest at Cambridge, but dropped the idea when informed by Flamsteed that he had little Latin and no Greek. In 1719, he succeeded Flamsteed as the Examiner of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital, retaining the position until his death when his brother John took over both that post, and running the Academy at Greenwich. His will, proved in August 1728, names his wife 'Ester' as his heir but they appear to have been childless. This portrait, engraved by John Faber after Michael Dahl, was published in 1723 but then used as a frontispiece to Weston's, 'A copy-book written for the use of the young-gentlemen at the Academy in Greenwich' (1726). He is depicted wearing a wig and sitting at his desk or work table in an informal striped dressing gown or banyan, with the tools of his trade: a notebook (clearly titled 'Lectiones Astronomicae Lectio 12'), papers, writing and drawing materials and a dissected cone.