diff --git a/examples/recipes/create_subplots.py b/examples/recipes/create_subplots.py
deleted file mode 100644
index 3c641a8f9d56..000000000000
--- a/examples/recipes/create_subplots.py
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,45 +0,0 @@
-"""
-Easily creating subplots
-========================
-
-In early versions of matplotlib, if you wanted to use the pythonic API
-and create a figure instance and from that create a grid of subplots,
-possibly with shared axes, it involved a fair amount of boilerplate
-code.  e.g.
-"""
-
-import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
-import numpy as np
-
-
-# Fixing random state for reproducibility
-np.random.seed(19680801)
-
-x = np.random.randn(50)
-
-# old style
-fig = plt.figure()
-ax1 = fig.add_subplot(221)
-ax2 = fig.add_subplot(222, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)
-ax3 = fig.add_subplot(223, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)
-ax3 = fig.add_subplot(224, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1)
-
-###############################################################################
-# Fernando Perez has provided the nice top-level function
-# `~matplotlib.pyplot.subplots` (note the "s" at the end) to create
-# everything at once, and turn on x and y sharing for the whole bunch.
-# You can either unpack the axes individually...
-
-# new style method 1; unpack the axes
-fig, ((ax1, ax2), (ax3, ax4)) = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
-ax1.plot(x)
-
-###############################################################################
-# or get them back as a numrows x numcolumns object array which supports
-# numpy indexing
-
-# new style method 2; use an axes array
-fig, axs = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
-axs[0, 0].plot(x)
-
-plt.show()