diff --git a/doc/users/whats_new.rst b/doc/users/whats_new.rst
index f3dfbb720e89..54568d54c6a5 100644
--- a/doc/users/whats_new.rst
+++ b/doc/users/whats_new.rst
@@ -75,6 +75,13 @@ directive - ``close-figs`` - that closes any previous figure windows before
 creating the plots.  This can help avoid some surprising duplicates of plots
 when using ``plot_directive``.
 
+Support for URL string arguments to ``imread``
+----------------------------------------------
+
+The ``imread`` function now accepts URL strings that point to remote PNG
+files. This circumvents the generation of a HTTPResponse object directly.
+
+
 .. _whats-new-1-4:
 
 new in matplotlib-1.4
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/image.py b/lib/matplotlib/image.py
index 2428147218bb..a5b5b4ab88d0 100644
--- a/lib/matplotlib/image.py
+++ b/lib/matplotlib/image.py
@@ -7,6 +7,9 @@
                         unicode_literals)
 
 import six
+from six.moves.urllib.parse import urlparse
+from six.moves.urllib.request import urlopen
+from six import BytesIO
 
 import os
 import warnings
@@ -1201,8 +1204,9 @@ def imread(fname, format=None):
     """
     Read an image from a file into an array.
 
-    *fname* may be a string path or a Python file-like object.  If
-    using a file object, it must be opened in binary mode.
+    *fname* may be a string path, a valid URL, or a Python
+    file-like object.  If using a file object, it must be opened in binary
+    mode.
 
     If *format* is provided, will try to read file of that type,
     otherwise the format is deduced from the filename.  If nothing can
@@ -1215,7 +1219,9 @@ def imread(fname, format=None):
     matplotlib can only read PNGs natively, but if `PIL
     <http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/>`_ is installed, it will
     use it to load the image and return an array (if possible) which
-    can be used with :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.imshow`.
+    can be used with :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.imshow`. Note, URL strings
+    may not be compatible with PIL. Check the PIL documentation for more
+    information.
     """
 
     def pilread(fname):
@@ -1224,20 +1230,19 @@ def pilread(fname):
             from PIL import Image
         except ImportError:
             return None
-        if cbook.is_string_like(fname):
-            # force close the file after reading the image
-            with open(fname, "rb") as fh:
-                image = Image.open(fh)
-                return pil_to_array(image)
-        else:
-            image = Image.open(fname)
-            return pil_to_array(image)
+        image = Image.open(fname)
+        return pil_to_array(image)
 
     handlers = {'png': _png.read_png, }
     if format is None:
         if cbook.is_string_like(fname):
-            basename, ext = os.path.splitext(fname)
-            ext = ext.lower()[1:]
+            parsed = urlparse(fname)
+            # If the string is a URL, assume png
+            if parsed.scheme != '':
+                ext = 'png'
+            else:
+                basename, ext = os.path.splitext(fname)
+                ext = ext.lower()[1:]
         elif hasattr(fname, 'name'):
             basename, ext = os.path.splitext(fname.name)
             ext = ext.lower()[1:]
@@ -1260,8 +1265,14 @@ def pilread(fname):
     # reader extension, since Python handles them quite well, but it's
     # tricky in C.
     if cbook.is_string_like(fname):
-        with open(fname, 'rb') as fd:
+        parsed = urlparse(fname)
+        # If fname is a URL, download the data
+        if parsed.scheme != '':
+            fd = BytesIO(urlopen(fname).read())
             return handler(fd)
+        else:
+            with open(fname, 'rb') as fd:
+                return handler(fd)
     else:
         return handler(fname)
 
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/tests/baseline_images/test_image/imread_url.png b/lib/matplotlib/tests/baseline_images/test_image/imread_url.png
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..dc2d80cefe31
Binary files /dev/null and b/lib/matplotlib/tests/baseline_images/test_image/imread_url.png differ
diff --git a/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_image.py b/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_image.py
index 89338d33fdad..34f47f25ffc3 100644
--- a/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_image.py
+++ b/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_image.py
@@ -89,6 +89,15 @@ def test_image_python_io():
     buffer.seek(0)
     plt.imread(buffer)
 
+@image_comparison(baseline_images=['imread_url'], extensions=['png'])
+def test_imread_url_string():
+    try:
+        img = plt.imread('http://matplotlib.org/_static/logo2.png')
+    except URLError:
+        print('No network access. Test imread_url_string skipped.')
+        img = plt.imread(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),
+                     'baseline_images', 'test_image', 'imread_url.png'))
+
 @knownfailureif(not HAS_PIL)
 def test_imread_pil_uint16():
     img = plt.imread(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),