Rivière identified several of the personalities in the painting. Despite Renoir's resource of distributing a sought after fashionable hat of the time amongst his models (the straw bonnet with a wide red ribbon top right is an example of this hat, called a "timbale"), he was unable to persuade his favourite sixteen-year-old model Jeanne Samary, who appears in "La balançoire", to pose as principal for the painting (in fact she was conducting an affair with a local boy at the time). It is her sister Estelle who poses as the girl wearing a blue and pink striped dress. These two girls came to "Le Moulin" every Sunday with their family; with two younger sisters barely taller than the tables, and their mother and father, properly chaperoned by their mother (entry was free for girls at "Le Moulin" and not all were models of virtue). Beside her is a group consisting of Pierre-Franc Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte (also appearing in "La balançoire"), fellow painters, as well as Rivière himself. Behind her, amongst the dancers, are to be found Henri Gervex, Eugène Pierre Lestringuez and Paul Lhote (who appears in "Dance in the Country"). In the middle distance, in the middle of the dance hall, the Cuban painter Don Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cardenas is depicted in striped trousers dancing with the model called Margot (Marguerite Legrand). Apparently the exuberant Margot found Solares too reserved and was endeavouring to loosen him up by dancing polkas with him and teaching him dubious songs in the local slang. She was to die of typhoid just two years later, Renoir nursing her until the end, paying both for her treatment and her funeral.