As mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Up to Speed, the creators of matplotlib were originally focused on building a GTK+ application for researchers and providing a command interface for the interactive plotting of data, not unlike that provided by MATLAB.

Both of these aims helped drive the development of improved abstractions for matplotlib. It was in this dual crucible that the top-level object of the rendered plots in matplotlib gained its rightful prominence—the Figure. These ideas led to various foundational objects in matplotlib, and the relationships between them ultimately provided the basis for the architecture of this library.