matplotlib.pyplot: create a subplot of stored plots - python-3.x

Question

python 3.6 om mac
matplotlib 2.1.0
using matplotlib.pyplot (as plt)
Let's say i have a few plt.figures() that i appended into a list called figures as objects. When in command line i do: figures[0]it produces the plot for the index 0 of the list figures.
However, how can i arrange to have all the plots in figures to be in a subplot.
# Pseudo code:
plt.figure()
for i, fig in enumerate(figures): # figures contains the plots
plt.subplot(2, 2, i+1)
fig # location i+1 of the subplot is filled with the fig plot element
So as a result, i would a 2 by 2 grid that contains each plot found in figures.
hoping this makes sense.

Answer 1

A figure is a figure. You cannot have a figure inside a figure. The usual approach is to create a figure, create one or several subplots, plot something in the subplots.
In case it may happen that you want to plot something in different axes or figures, it might make sense to wrap the plotting in a function which takes the axes as argument.
You could then use this function to plot to an axes of a new figure or to plot to an axes of a figure with many subplots.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
def myplot(ax, data_x, data_y, color="C0"):
ax.plot(data_x, data_y, color=color)
ax.legend()
x = np.linspace(0,10)
y = np.cumsum(np.random.randn(len(x),4), axis=0)
#create 4 figures
for i in range(4):
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
myplot(ax, x, y[:,i], color="C{}".format(i))
# create another figure with each plot as subplot
fig, ax = plt.subplots(2,2)
for i in range(4):
myplot(ax.flatten()[i], x, y[:,i], color="C{}".format(i))
plt.show()