How to prevent jupyter notebook from plotting figure returned by a function

I have a simple function:

def return_fig():
    fig = plt.figure()
    plt.plot([1,2,3,4,5],[1,2,3,4,5])
    return fig

In a jupyter notebook, I define this function and

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

In a new cell, I have

figure = return_fig()

When I execute the cell, the figure gets shown immediately. However, I just want the figure object to exist, and to be able to show it with plt.show() later on. This is what happens within a regular python script, but not within a jupyter notebook. What am I missing?

>Solution :

Maybe plt.close() helps.

def return_fig():
    fig = plt.figure()
    plt.plot([1,2,3,4,5],[1,2,3,4,5])
    plt.close(fig)
    return fig

Run:

>>> figure = return_fig()
>>> figure

Output: