Bust-length portrait of the actress in costume., In Barker, James N. The tragedy of superstition (Philadelphia, 1826), frontispiece., “An incomplete list of [Mrs. Duff’s] performances reveals that she played at least 220 different roles in her career. Junius Booth called her the greatest tragic actress in the world and John Gilbert proclaimed that she had no superior. Joseph N. Ireland, her biographer and a stage historian of considerable experience with actors, believed she was the best tragic actress in nineteenth-century America.” -- Claudia Durst Johnson (1999). “Duff, Mary Ann Dyke”. American National Biography. 7. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 19-20.