Remove the legend on a matplotlib figure

Question

To add a legend to a matplotlib plot, one simply runs legend().

How to remove a legend from a plot?

(The closest I came to this

Answer 1

you have to add the following lines of code:

ax = gca()
ax.legend_ = None
draw()

gca() returns the current axes handle, and has that property legend_

Answer 2

According to the information from @naitsirhc, I wanted to find the official API documentation. Here are my finding and some sample code.

1. I created a matplotlib.Axes object by seaborn.scatterplot().
2. The ax.get_legend() will return a matplotlib.legned.Legend instance.
3. Finally, you call .remove() function to remove the legend from your plot.

ax = sns.scatterplot(......)
_lg = ax.get_legend()
_lg.remove()

If you check the matplotlib.legned.Legend API document, you won't see the .remove() function.

The reason is that the matplotlib.legned.Legend inherited the matplotlib.artist.Artist. Therefore, when you call ax.get_legend().remove() that basically call matplotlib.artist.Artist.remove().

In the end, you could even simplify the code into two lines.

ax = sns.scatterplot(......)
ax.get_legend().remove()

Answer 3

If you are not using fig and ax plot objects you can do it like so:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# do plot specifics
plt.legend('')
plt.show()

Answer 4

if you call pyplot as plt

frameon=False is to remove the border around the legend

and '' is passing the information that no variable should be in the legend

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.legend('',frameon=False)

Answer 5

You could use the legend's set_visible method:

ax.legend().set_visible(False)
draw()

This is based on a answer provided to me in response to a similar question I had some time ago here

(Thanks for that answer Jouni - I'm sorry I was unable to mark the question as answered... perhaps someone who has the authority can do so for me?)

Answer 6

I made a legend by adding it to the figure, not to an axis (matplotlib 2.2.2). To remove it, I set the legends attribute of the figure to an empty list:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax2 = ax1.twinx()

ax1.plot(range(10), range(10, 20), label='line 1')
ax2.plot(range(10), range(30, 20, -1), label='line 2')

fig.legend()

fig.legends = []

plt.show()