Figures and backends#

When looking at Matplotlib visualization, you are almost always looking at Artists placed on a Figure. In the example below, the figure is the blue region and add_subplot has added an Axes artist to the Figure (see Parts of a Figure). A more complicated visualization can add multiple Axes to the Figure, colorbars, legends, annotations, and the Axes themselves can have multiple Artists added to them (e.g. ax.plot or ax.imshow).

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(4, 2), facecolor='lightskyblue',
                 layout='constrained')
fig.suptitle('A nice Matplotlib Figure')
ax = fig.add_subplot()
ax.set_title('Axes', loc='left', fontstyle='oblique', fontsize='medium')

(Source code, 2x.png, png)