Creating figures and subplots

Matplotlib supports plotting multiple charts (subplots) on a single figure, which is Matplotlib's term for the drawing canvas.

Defining figures' subplots

To create a matplotlib.pyplot.figure object, use the following method:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12, 6), dpi=200)

This yields an empty figure object (0 Axes):

<Figure size 2400x1200 with 0 Axes>

Before we plot anything on this figure, we need to add subplots to create space for them. The matplotlib.pyplot.figure.add_subplot(...) method lets us do that by specifying the size of the subplot and the location.

The following code block adds a subplot of size 1x2 grids on the left, then a subplot of 2x2 on the top right, and finally, a subplot of 2x2 on the bottom right:

ax1 = fig.add_subplot(1, 2, 1)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(2, 2, 2)
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(2, 2, 4)
fig

The result is the following figure object containing the subplots we...