@timhoffm suggested visual documentation of the plotting API via thumbnails and I think this would be a great way of addressing the 'what does this visualization library call this thing' problem for a lot of common things:

I'm not thinking of adding another gallery/index (well, yes I agree it would be nice to have a small example for every function but that's still another thing.). Rather, can we amend the currenthttps://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/axes_api.html by some visual "icons", e.g.

Some comments:

• Of course, not every function can necessarily be represented (e.g.relim() would be challenging), but IMHO it would be perfectly fine not to have visuals on all of them.
• The images can, but do not have to be generated by code. It's an illustration not a code example. I wouldn't even show the code to the end user. - Effectively this means we just embed images that we have previously created one way or the other.
• To get this, we probably have to do some manual styling in sphinx.

Originally posted by@timhoffm in#23204 (comment)