"It advertised them both": Free creative work in "Of Human Bondage"

Although W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" (1915) takes place from the late 1880s to the late 1900s, at least one moment could be from the twenty-first century. The main character Philip Carey's painter friend Lawson gets asked to paint portraits not for a money but for the exposure that it will give him: "[...]  he had arrived at that stage of the portrait-painter’s career when he was noticed a good deal by the critics and found a number of aristocratic ladies who were willing to allow him to paint them for nothing (it advertised them both, and gave the great ladies quite an air of patronesses of the arts) [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 September 2022)