How to display matplotlib plots in a Jupyter tab widget?

I added a couple of things to make your code work as you would like

  • Add %matplotlib inline at the top of the cell
  • Replace your display(fig) calls with plt.show(fig) calls.
%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import ipywidgets as widgets
import numpy as np

out1 = widgets.Output()
out2 = widgets.Output()
data1 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.normal(size = 50))
data2 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.normal(size = 100))

tab = widgets.Tab(children = [out1, out2])
tab.set_title(0, 'First')
tab.set_title(1, 'Second')
display(tab)

with out1:
    fig1, axes1 = plt.subplots()
    data1.hist(ax = axes1)
    plt.show(fig1)

with out2:
    fig2, axes2 = plt.subplots()
    data2.hist(ax = axes2)
    plt.show(fig2)