Change default background color for matplotlib plots

Question

I am using ipython with matplotlib. Is it possible to configure the default background color for matplotlib plots? The curent (white)

Answer 1

You need to set both the axes and figure background colors:

f = plt.figure(facecolor=".6")
ax = f.add_subplot(111, axisbg=".6")
ax.plot([0, 1, 2], [1, 0, 2])

There is additionally a distinction between the facecolor for the interactive plot and what gets saved; you also have to pass facecolor to f.savefig if you want a uniform background on the resulting file.

You can change the defaults with the following fields in the rcParams dictionary:

import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.rcParams["figure.facecolor"]
mpl.rcParams["axes.facecolor"]
mpl.rcParams["savefig.facecolor"]

Note that this works a little unexpectedly in the IPython notebook with an inline backend, where the "saved" version of the figure you see below the cell is not controlled by the figure parameter, but by the savefig paramter.