The preliminary study for this plate, in the same sense and incised, in the Musée Condé, Chantilly (Schnackenburg, op.cit., no. 72), faithfully repeats the picture of the same composition, signed and dated 1652, in the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio (Hofstede de Groot 546). Three other studies, all in the same sense, can be related to the Toledo picture, and thus to this plate as well: two studies for the figures are in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Schnackenburg, op.cit., no. 73, recto and verso) while another is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (Schnackenburg, op.cit., no. 74). A further comparable drawing is in the British Museum, London (Schnackenburg, op.cit., no. 135). Schnackenburg dates this plate to circa 1653- after 1660. As Slatkes notes (Pelletier a.o., op.cit., p. 244), the etching relies on the picture dated 1652, and thus should be dated to shortly after that, while the style of etching itself suggests a date not much after 1654. The subject of this plate, the largest in Ostade's printed oeuvre, a dance in an inn, has alternatively been identified as a peasant wedding, while Linda Stone-Ferrier (Dutch Prints of Daily Life: Mirrors of Life or Masks of Morals ?, Lawrence, 1983, p. 150, no. 39) suggests that the leafy tree and its branch on the floor are signs of an indoor May Day festival, which celebrates the advent of spring.