He was the sixth child of First Lieutenant and manorial owner Alexander Weichberger and his wife, Amalie. In 1848, the family moved from Krauthausen to Eisenach.
From 1860 to 1861, he attended the Polytechnische Schule in Dresden (now the Technical University of Dresden), where he studied architecture. This was apparently not to his liking as, after only one semester, he left to enroll at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School, Weimar. Until 1862, he studied with Arnold Böcklin and Franz von Lenbach then, until 1868, with Alexander Michelis and, finally, with Max Schmidt. His formal studies were interspersed with study trips to Italy and the Baltic Seacoast.
In 1876, he married Elise Choinanus, from a family of musicians, who was twelve years his junior. They had four children, including the writer, Konrad Weichberger [de]. From 1877 to 1906, he worked as a free-lance artist, creating paintings and folia of etchings. He also gave occasional drawing lessons. After 1899, he served as a Professor at the Art School in Weimar. He created his initial sketches with brush and paint, focusing on motifs from the Thuringian Forest, Rügen and the Tirol. Many of his sketchbooks and drawings are at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
He died of a heart attack in 1913, at the age of seventy.
