How to make inline plots in Jupyter Notebook larger?

The default figure size (in inches) is controlled by

matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [width, height]

For example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [10, 5]

creates a figure with 10 (width) x 5 (height) inches

If you only want the image of your figure to appear larger without changing the general appearance of your figure increase the figure resolution. Changing the figure size as suggested in most other answers will change the appearance since font sizes do not scale accordingly.

import matplotlib.pylab as plt
plt.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 200

Yes, play with figuresize and dpi like so (before you call your subplot):

fig=plt.figure(figsize=(12,8), dpi= 100, facecolor='w', edgecolor='k')

As @tacaswell and @Hagne pointed out, you can also change the defaults if it's not a one-off:

plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [12, 8]
plt.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 100 # 200 e.g. is really fine, but slower

I have found that %matplotlib notebook works better for me than inline with Jupyter notebooks.

Note that you may need to restart the kernel if you were using %matplotlib inline before.

Update 2019: If you are running Jupyter Lab you might want to use %matplotlib widget