Setting plot background colour in Seaborn

Question

I am using Seaborn to plot some data in Pandas.

I am making some very large plots (factorplots).

To see them, I am using some visualisation facilities at my university. I am using a Compound screen made up of 4 by 4 monitors with small (but nonzero) bevel -- the gap between the screens. This gap is black. To minimise the disconnect between the screen i want the graph backgound to be black. I have been digging around the documentation and playing around and I can't work it out.. Surely this is simple.

I can get grey background using set_style('darkgrid')

do i need to access the plot in matplotlib directly?

Answer 1

seaborn.set takes an rc argument that accepts a dictionary of valid matplotlib rcparams. So we need to set two things: the axes.facecolor, which is the color of the area where the data are drawn, and the figure.facecolor, which is the everything a part of the figure outside of the axes object.

(edited with advice from @mwaskom)

So if you do:

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn
seaborn.set(rc={'axes.facecolor':'cornflowerblue', 'figure.facecolor':'cornflowerblue'})

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

You get:

And that'll work with your FacetGrid as well.