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.
