Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From Stanford University

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	Holmes and Watson visit the art galleries located along Old Bond Street, at the center of the map

...and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters. He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel.
Several different schools of Belgian painters were active in the late 19^th century. James Ensor (1860-1949), arguably the most famous, was a maverick who painted on macabre themes and anticipated the symbols of Expressionism. Of the Symbolist painters, Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) is probably the best known. Others painted in a naturalistic style, depicting workers and peasants at their labors.

Watson occasionally mentions Holmes's ignorance of all things that do not touch on detective work:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
—from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2

In later stories, Holmes no longer seems to be quite so ignorant, but actually has a good knowledge of many disciplines that do not touch upon criminal activities, especially music.

...and when he did speak it was in a much broader and more Western dialect than any which we had heard from him in the morning.
Apparently, Sir Henry Baskerville's American accent grows stronger when he is upset.

"Seems to me they are playing me for a sucker in this hotel," he cried. "They'll find they've started in to monkey with the wrong man unless they are careful. By thunder, if that chap can't find my missing boot there will be trouble. I can take a joke with the best, Mr. Holmes, but they've got a bit over the mark this time."
Conan Doyle loved American "wild-west" adventure stories, and they might have been his major source of knowledge about American slang expressions. In this passage, he makes the most out of Sir Henry's use of American slang, mixing it with Briticisms such as "chap" and "they've got a bit over the mark." Perhaps he was trying to show that Sir Henry's character had been formed by exposure to two cultures: his upbringing in Devon and his later experiences in North America.