BIG ON
On Kawara only painted eleven Dates, at his largest size, 7 foot 5 inches by 5 foot 1 inch.
That's pretty big. You'd need a substantial room for a size 'H' to fit comfortably on a wall. Really it's institution-compatible, as this image suggests. 
Actually, that's a well-endowed boardroom, displaying Donald Judd as well as On Kawara. It might be described as a super-elite, corporate space. And I suppose if you had a domestic space with big enough rooms you could happily house a size 'H' Date Painting.
Presently, there is one in the Art Institute of Chicago. One in Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art. Three in the Glenstone Museum near Washington D.C. That's five that are publicly accessible, though a long way from where I live. And the other 5 are owned by private collectors in the US and Europe. I wish one of them would see this article, invite me round to their palace/loft so we could have a Kawara party. That would involve me largely ignoring the owner as I drank his or her fine wine, considered their Date Painting, and listened to Bowie’s Young Americans album, over and over again.
Ten of the 11 survived to be shown in an exhibition that On Kawara designed himself for Dallas Museum of Art in 2008. Below is a plan of the exhibition, but please ignore the black and coloured blocks for now, dear reader, it's the Dates you want to clock:
The above diagram is going to provide the structure for this section of my website. In other words, first I will discuss the three 1969 Dates in the bottom left gallery. Then the two Dates facing each other in the corridor made nine years later, in 1978. Then the other pair of October/November Dates shown further along the same corridor, painted in 1982. And lastly the three Dates shown in the top right gallery, made in 1984 and 1987.
This implies that On Kawara used the structure of the 2008 show to say something about the relationship between his size 'H' paintings. I'm fairly sure he did; he liked to use maquettes of the gallery he was designing an exhibition for. But you can judge for yourself how helpful - or not - he was being, as you read the following series of short, illustrated essays.
The diagram will be popping up again (and again) in an ever-evolving kind of way.
1969 essay.
