The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror of her vanity table, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull.

And art that contains a human skull as a focal point is called a memento mori (Latin for "remember death"), a work that reminds people of their mortality.It is less widely known that Gilbert was an early contributor to animation,[2] and a camouflage artist (or camoufleur) for the U.S.

As an early contributor to animated films (Grant, p. 49), Gilbert worked for John R. Bray in 1915–16 on the production of a series of moving shadow plays called Silhouette Fantasies.

Shipping Board (the Emergency Fleet Corporation), as did other well-known artists and illustrators, including McClelland Barclay, William MacKay, and Henry Reuterdahl (Behrens 2009).

Throughout his life (and still today), Gilbert was so strongly identified with his drawing All Is Vanity that he is sometimes mistakenly credited with two other popular double image artworks, Gossip: And the Devil Was There, and Social Donkey, both of which were apparently made by another illustrator of the same time period, George A. Wotherspoon.