The flower in Georgia O'Keeffe's 1927 painting Red Canna is a canna lily.
O'Keeffe painted many enlarged flowers, transforming familiar botanical subjects into commanding compositions. In Red Canna, the flower’s saturated red petals fill the picture space, encouraging viewers to focus on color, curves, and organic structure rather than on the plant as a small garden specimen.
The work belongs to a period when O'Keeffe was particularly associated with close-up flower paintings. She rejected the idea that such paintings were merely decorative, emphasizing instead the visual power of seeing a natural form at an unfamiliar scale.
Flower identifications can be confused because O'Keeffe also painted irises, poppies, and calla lilies. The title supplies the key distinction here: a canna is a different plant from a calla lily, even though both have dramatic flowers and appear in her broader body of work.