A pure OO (look Ma, no pyplot!) example using the agg backend.
from matplotlib.backends.backend_agg import FigureCanvasAgg as FigureCanvas
from matplotlib.figure import Figure
fig = Figure()
# A canvas must be manually attached to the figure (pyplot would automatically
# do it). This is done by instanciating the canvas with the figure as
# argument.
FigureCanvas(fig)
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1, 2, 3])
ax.set_title('hi mom')
ax.grid(True)
ax.set_xlabel('time')
ax.set_ylabel('volts')
fig.savefig('test')
Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 0.000 seconds)