When I used the %matplotlib magic in ipython (notebook) to enable interactive matplotlib plotting, pickling of figures does not work anymore.

Test code:

%matplotlib  
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pickle
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot([1,2,3,4], [1,8,4,6])
pickle.dump(ax, file('test_plot.pickle', 'w'))

gives:

PicklingError: Can't pickle <built-in method copy_from_bbox of tuple object at 0x000000000B2A2988>: it's not found as __main__.copy_from_bbox

If I remove the %matplotlib line, then it works as expected.

@pelson It was also mentioned in the SO question you answered (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7290370/store-and-reload-matplotlib-pyplot-object), and you encouraged to open an issue report, but I did not found it.

Using matplotlib 1.4.0, Windows 7, ipython 2.3.