Matplotlib figure not showing up in output widget in first cell of Jupyter notebook

Question

I have the following snippet in the first cell of a Jupyter notebook:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import ipywidgets as widgets
import numpy as np

out = widgets.Output()
data = pd.DataFrame(np.random.normal(size = 50))
plt.ioff()
with out:
    fig, axes = plt.subplots()
    data.hist(ax = axes)
    display(fig)
plt.ion()    
display(out)

If I restart the kernel and run this first cell, I see this output:

<Figure size 640x480 with 1 Axes>

However, if I run this first cell a second time, I see a matplotlib figure as I intended. This behavior also shows up if I move everything after the import of matplotlib to a second cell, restart the kernel, and rerun the entire notebook.

Is this difference in behavior intentional?

Can't reproduce this, neither with the classical jupyter notebook nor with jupyter lab. Can you provide your specs? — Daniel Lenz
@DanielLenz Ubuntu 16.04, Python 3.5.1 installed in a virtual environment, with Jupyter 4.4.0 and matplotlib 2.2.2 installed via pip. — Arthur Azevedo De Amorim
@ImportanceOfBeingErnest I was trying to create a tab widget with plots on each tab, so I had to wrap the plots in output widgets. I removed the original tab to make the example simpler. — Arthur Azevedo De Amorim

alz alz · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-26T06:27:42

The code rearranging and adding magic command '%matplotlib notebook' work for me.

%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import ipywidgets as widgets
import numpy as np

out = widgets.Output()

plt.ioff()
fig, axes = plt.subplots()
plt.ion()

data = pd.DataFrame(np.random.normal(size = 50))
data.hist(ax = axes)

display(out)

with out:
    display(fig)

Matplotlib figure not showing up in output widget in first cell of Jupyter notebook

1 Answers