The artist layer
The artist layer constitutes the bulk of what matplotlib actually does—the generation of the plots for the purpose of display, manipulation, and publication. Most work in the artist layer is performed by a number of classes, most of which are derived from the Artist
base class.
The artist layer is concerned with things such as the lines, shapes, axes, text, and so on. These are the subclasses of the Artist
class that define things such as the following:
A canvas-artist coordinate transformation
Visibility
A clip box that defines the paintable area
Labels
A callback registry instance to handle user interaction events
The Artist
subclasses can be classified into one of the following two groups:
Primitives
Containers
The following two sections provide more details about these groups.
Primitives
The matplotlib artist primitives are classes of graphical objects that are supposed to be painted on a figure's canvas. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
Line2D
Shape (patch) classes...