No, that is not possible. A figure cannot be contained in any other object. Figures also always have children objects, some of which cannot be contained in an axes; for example in R2014a, if you
h = figure(1);
then even without drawing in it, it will have children of type uimenu, uipushtool, uitogglesplittool, uitoggletool, uitoolbar, none of which can be children of axes.
It is common for figures to have multiple axes; for example legend() creates additional axes.
For these reasons, you should not just arbitrarily move a figure or the contents of a figure into an axes.
What is usually reasonable to do is to create a uipanel, and to run through all of the non-ui* direct children of the figure and set() the Parent of the object to be the uipanel.
code.run() %Generates figure(1)
h = code.getFigureHandle(); %get the handle
panelh = handles.uipanel1; %presuming you already created it
hc = findall(h, '-depth', 1);
hct = get(hc,'type');
fighand = strcmp(hct, 'figure');
uihand = strncmp(hct, 'ui', 2);
hc(fighand | uihand) = []; %get rid of those
for ch = hc
try; set(ch,'Parent', panelh); catch; end
end
