Subplots and axes in matplotlib

We often want to do several plots or images on the same figure.

We can do this with the matplotlib subplots command.

The standard input arguments to subplots are the number of rows and the number of columns you want in your grid of axes. For example, if you want two plots underneath each other you would call subplots(2, 1) for two rows and one column.

subplots returns a figure object, that is an object representing the figure containing the axes. It also returns a list of axes. The axes are objects representing the axes on which we can plot. The axis objects have methods like plot and imshow that allow us to plot on the given axes:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.arange(0, np.pi * 2, 0.1)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 1)
axes[0].plot(x, np.sin(x))
axes[1].plot(x, np.cos(x))

[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x7f490c384f10>]